New router, worse router
Our internet overlord TeleCable has decided to upgrade the hardware they had installed at home (the old Motorola SURFboard SB5101E) to something new, supporting DOCSIS 3.0, so they can happily say all their customers enjoy 100 MBps download rates. Not checked this fact yet, though.
The hardware of choice (I wonder who choose it) is a Cisco EPC3925, which comes also with Wi-Fi, so I decided to shut down my Linksys WRT54GL, for saving some electricity and enjoy the faster Wi-Fi (N in the Cisco vs G in the Linksys).
Unfortunately the EPC3925 doesn't like machines with static IP addresses on the network and was unable to route between two of them using the wired ports. Strangely both machines were reachable when accessed from a third machine connected to the wireless network with static address too (!).
After struggling for a whole afternoon with it (even reformatted the SD card of one of the machines thinking it could be the problem) I gave up using static addresses and just solved it the other way around:
- Reconfigure the whole set of machines with static addresses to use DHCP instead
- Watch the machines to pop up in the router's client list as they connected to the network and write down their MAC address
- Configure the router DHCP server to give a determined address to each machine MAC
This way they still have a fixed address but now the router is capable to route traffic among them. While I was at it I decided to collect the MACs of the devices which had no fixed address (TV, Wii, Smartphone) and give them an address, so now with a simple ping I can now check if they're on or off :-) (before I had to nmap the whole /24 segment to be able to identify the machines).
Anyway, despite it works mostly OK now I'm still not liking it much. Clearly it's a substandard device (each time you expand the DHCP address range every other DHCP configuration is lost!), and who knows what other surprises it hides. For now it has entered the while it works, don't touch it category, but I don't expect it to last as longer as the Linksys.