Meteobridge takes over network

[david.delano]

I apparently had a brief power glitch while on vacation last week that restarted my network equipment. On top of this, the desktop, which should have been off, and the laptop that I VPN into both went through several reboots due to patch updates (not sure how the desktop came on as it's supposed to stay OFF after a power outage). I thought I had everything back up and running, but things were a bit slow, and web sites were timing out, etc. Upon examining the desktop and laptop network settings, the DHCP and DNS both were pointing to the IP of the Meteobridge, which is static. I don't see any settings which would turn DNS/DHCP off or on, so I'm not sure how to prevent this from happening in the future. I unplugged the Meteobridge for awhile, and rebooted a few things, and think I have things mostly working. One of the issues is that the Meteobridge was handing out IP addresses that conflicted with IP addresses already handed out by the router, so I know that at least some of the devices on the network were attaching correctly.

Any way to prevent the Meteobridge from becoming a DNS/DHCP server??

David

[admin]

I don't know what is wrong with your infrastructure,
but Meteobridge is not acting as a DHCP server.
When you did some reconfiguration of it at OPENWRT level,
then you are on your own.

I also don't recommend to give Meteobridge a static IP on its
web interface. It is much smarter to tell your DHCP serving
router to bind one of its IPs to the MAC of the Meteobridge
and by that to make sure the Meteobridge is found always at
the same IP. When network/router changes, Meteobridge
will still be in your new class c network via DHCP logic
instead of being jailed into a fixed class c net your new router
might not use and therefore not being able to reach Meteobridge
in your LAN at all. I hope you can understand that technical difference.

Please also don't connect the Meteobridge via Ethernet cable with your LAN,
when Meteobridge is configured for WiFi operation. It still does not
do DHCP on the LAN port, but there might be side effects especially,
when Meteobridge is configured to WLAN/LAN bridging mode.

[david.delano]

I haven't messed with my Meteobridge at all, other than through the web interface. The only thing that happened is that everything, including the Meteobridge, rebooted. After the reboot, Meteobridge was somehow providing DHCP and DNS (which of course didn't work). I should also add that the Meteobridge picked up the newest release on the reboot.

I think I understand that I should dedicate an IP address for the Meteobridge through my router rather than using a static IP. I'll try that.

I'm using WiFi to connect the Meteobridge, not ethernet.

Could the Meteobridge have been in a state when it was downloading the update that other devices thought it was providing DHCP? I should note that you are correct, the device wasn't providing these services, and thus, any device that connected to it couldn't access the internet, which was a pain, as I couldn't access any of my remote devices while I was gone. Also, the Meteobridge itself stopped reporting data until it was rebooted again, so was down for a little over 3 days.

[david.delano]

I have successfully switched the Meteobridge to using DHCP and dedicated the IP on the router.

I do notice on the Meteobridge System tab that the DNS is set to 127.0.0.1. The gateway is 192.168.0.1. I would have thought the DNS would be set to the same.

[admin]

OpenWRT underneath Meteobridge does DNS caching (as a router usually does) and therefore reports localhost as DNS. In reality it connects to the IP your DHCP server advertises for DNS requests, which is the gateway IP (your router) or the DNS server from your provider. That might look strange but is totally OK.

[david.delano]

In that case, I think what happened is that when the power went out, everything except for the main router came back up. The main router did, also, but was in some weird inoperable state - I could not access it remotely either. Thus, I think the devices that were searching for a DHCP/DNS server could only see the Meteobridge, and thus tried to connect to it. Sound likely?

I understand now the 127.0.0.1 setting.