Home hub 6 - cannot access devices on ethernet port from wireless device

[ceperman]

I have a powerline extender connected via ethernet to the hub. Devices on the extender work fine and show up in the hub manager display as being on port 1. I've just woken up to the fact that devices connected to the hub via wireless cannot access these devices. I recently switched from a HH5 to HH6, and on the HH5 this worked fine.

Any ideas what the problem is?

[albertj]

Hi @ceperman 

Thanks for posting.

Have you tried a reboot of the Hub?

What are the devices that cannot be accessed via Wireless? Is it something like a Chromecast and you can’t cast to it or a NAS?

Has the IP Address changed since you last connected? If setting a Static IP it should be between 192.168.1.1 - 192.168.1.63 as this is not in the DHCP Range.

Thanks

[ceperman]

Hi @albertj

Thanks for replying.

The device I need to access is my internal Linux server which is on a static IP outside the DHCP range. To reiterate, the server is connected via a Devolo powerline extender into port 1 of the hub. This setup has been working for years through a number of hub iterations (4 & 5). In addition I have another computer plugged into port 2 which monitors the network and writes to a file on the server.

Using ping tools, I found that all the devices connected via the ethernet ports can see each other (this includes the devices connected via the powerline) but not the wireless connected devices, and vice versa. They are behaving almost as if they are on different subnets, esp. because the pings fail with "Destination Host Unreachable".

HOWEVER, I'm now really confused... that was the way it looked when I originally posted, and the way it did earlier today. But when I started looking for results to report here, thing started changing. Some of the pings returned a mixture of "Connection timeout" and "Destination Host Unreachable" (how is that possible?). Now everything can see everything. Huh?

One thing that I've (always) done is to change the hub subnet address from 192.168.1.x to 192.168.0.x (this is because my devices are set up to use the 192.168.0 subnet which was more usual in the past). Whether this has anything to do with it I don't know. I've no reason to think it does, everything in the router is reporting using 192.168.0 addresses (gateway 192.168.0.254, dhcp range 192.168.0.10-99), and it's been this way for years.

To make sure that all wireless connections were going to the hub I disabled the access point in the powerline. Could that have been causing problems? When I re-enabled it I switched it from using 40Mhz to 20Mhz as I read the higher freq. can cause interference.

So, for the moment it look OK. I'm puzzled but happy it's working. If things start to go wrong again I might be back 🙂

[ceperman]

I'm resurrecting this issue as it's not gone away. It's confusing because in the past the symptoms varied.

At the moment the symptoms are clear: devices connected via the hub wireless cannot see each other. They can see devices connected via LAN ports, and the LAN devices can see all wireless devices. However, wireless devices cannot see each other. This is a problem for the squeezebox app on my phone: it cannot connect to the wireless-connected squeezebox when connected to the router wireless access point. However, when my phone is connected via the wireless on my powerline extender, it works OK.

Pings between hub wireless connected devices get "destination host unreachable" which normally suggests they are on different subnets, which from their IP addresses, they aren't. Somehow the hub is blocking communication, but I don't know if this is deliberate or a bug.

[Cocksy]

Sorry to resurrect this old thread, but did you ever resolve the issue? I've recently changed from BT to another ISP and have now encountered the same issue as you are having - previously using the BT SmartHub 2 it was all working fine.

Every device has an IP address in the same range now, but exactly as you have devices connected via wi-fi can't see devices connected via ethernet and  vice-versa. I've restarted the router and the whole home discs, but not had any improvement. I haven't yet tried a factory reset as I don't want to lose all my settings - hopefully I won't need to...