Pogoplug V4 on bridged segment having problems

[caderoux]

Dotted lines indicate wireless connections, solid lines indicate Ethernet connections.

I used two ASUS routers and Tomato (Tomato Firmware 1.28.0000 MIPSR2-101 K26 USB Mega-VPN) to bridge my network. So I have two wired segments and a wireless network provided by the main router connected to my cable modem.

Everything seemed to be fine when I set up the bridge last week.

The main .1 router is set up for DHCP and virtually everything is DHCP with reservations by MAC address. The bridge has .2 assigned to it's LAN and it is set in wireless bridge mode. The .2 router is set in bridged mode and connects wirelessly to .1, providing connectivity for all the devices on its Ethernet ports.

But what I'm seeing today is that Pogoplug 2 (.195) cannot seem to get to the Internet.

It cannot ping 192.168.1.1.

It can ping .2 (it's bridge), .199 (wireless Mac), .197 (wired), .196 (wired) etc.

I am connected from .199 to .195 via SSH.

If I use Tomato's tools on the bridge, it can ping .1, 8.8.8.8 etc, so it seems to be fine.

What am I missing here? Seems like something simple.

Pogoplug2 ifconfig:

$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', '[root@alarm ~]# ifconfig
eth0: flags=4163<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
inet 192.168.1.195 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 192.168.1.255
inet6 fe80::225:31ff:fe05:38bc prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x20<link>
ether 00:25:31:05:38:bc txqueuelen 1000 (Ethernet)
RX packets 169 bytes 20660 (20.1 KiB)
RX errors 0 dropped 0 overruns 0 frame 0
TX packets 89 bytes 11323 (11.0 KiB)
TX errors 0 dropped 0 overruns 0 carrier 0 collisions 0
device interrupt 11

lo: flags=73<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING> mtu 16436
inet 127.0.0.1 netmask 255.0.0.0
inet6 ::1 prefixlen 128 scopeid 0x10<host>
loop txqueuelen 0 (Local Loopback)
RX packets 4 bytes 260 (260.0 B)
RX errors 0 dropped 0 overruns 0 frame 0
TX packets 4 bytes 260 (260.0 B)
TX errors 0 dropped 0 overruns 0 carrier 0 collisions 0
')
A PC on the bridged part is fine - pings 192.168.1.1

So there is something about the Pogoplug and the bridge. Moving it to the other router, it keeps its IP address and is able to connect out and see the bridged network just fine - it can ping the PC on the other segment and the .2 interface.

[moonman]

AFAIK some devices have problems being behind wireless bridge with other devices. If you leave only the PP on behind the bridge or make your bridge NAT with it's own DHCP server it will work just fine. WDS will work fine as well, but Tomato doesn't support WDS as far as I know. Try DD-WRT? It does support WDS and I've had it set up for a while. Use build 15508.

EDIT: Tomato (at least Tomato Shibby mod, and you seem to be running it anyway) supports WDS. http://www.howtogeek.com/104007/how-to- ... d-routers/

[caderoux]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('moonman', 'A')FAIK some devices have problems being behind wireless bridge with other devices. If you leave only the PP on behind the bridge or make your bridge NAT with it's own DHCP server it will work just fine. WDS will work fine as well, but Tomato doesn't support WDS as far as I know. Try DD-WRT? It does support WDS and I've had it set up for a while. Use build 15508.

EDIT: Tomato (at least Tomato Shibby mod, and you seem to be running it anyway) supports WDS. http://www.howtogeek.com/104007/how-to- ... d-routers/

[caderoux]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('moonman', 'A')FAIK some devices have problems being behind wireless bridge with other devices. If you leave only the PP on behind the bridge or make your bridge NAT with it's own DHCP server it will work just fine. WDS will work fine as well, but Tomato doesn't support WDS as far as I know. Try DD-WRT? It does support WDS and I've had it set up for a while. Use build 15508.

EDIT: Tomato (at least Tomato Shibby mod, and you seem to be running it anyway) supports WDS. http://www.howtogeek.com/104007/how-to- ... d-routers/

[caderoux]

I also moved the Raspberry Pi to the bridged segment and it has the same symptoms. The RPi is Debian, while the Pogoplug is Arch. A Windows PC and a Ubuntu PC both have no problems on the bridged segment.

[caderoux]

A friend who happens to be a network administrator and Cisco/router person set up a system which demonstrates the problem and then sent me a solution:

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'Y')ou would think it would have been discussed out there more. Who knows? I really think it's a combination of bugs. When you setup the 2nd router as a wireless bridge, the 1st router should only see the MAC address of the 2nd router's WLAN. It should proxy-arp all clients on its side. The logic of this is explained decently in sections 16.3 and 16.3.1 on this site: http://lartc.org/howto/lartc.bridging.proxy-arp.html

At any rate, I have a workaround for you. On your 192.168.1.1 router, go to Administration -> Scheduler. Enable "Custom 1" and put "arp -d 192.168.1.195" (your PogoPlug IP) in the Command Box without the quotes. Set it to execute every 3 minutes of every day. Shouldn't be necessary, but it's been working for my FreeBSD box connectivity for over 45 minutes.

[bodhi]

I agreed it's seem to be a bug in the router. But the fact that the MAC addresses were masked should not prevent the router to either assign a dynamic IP, or recognize the static IP of the Popgplug. I used to have a DLink wireless bridge (DAP-1522) that masks all the MAC address of the nodes behind it. But no problem for any computers to connect across that bridge. The only problem in that was WOL packet would not work, because it would stop at the bridge

[caderoux]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('bodhi', 'I') agreed it's seem to be a bug in the router. But the fact that the MAC addresses were masked should not prevent the router to either assign a dynamic IP, or recognize the static IP of the Popgplug. I used to have a DLink wireless bridge (DAP-1522) that masks all the MAC address of the nodes behind it. But no problem for any computers to connect across that bridge. The only problem in that was WOL packet would not work, because it would stop at the bridge

[moonman]

As I said, it is a known problem: http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Re ... omparisons : scroll down to the table.
Repeater Bridge and Client Bridge have the following problem Uses MAC address translation (MAT) (proxy ARP) (not compatible with some applications and protocols that depend on MAC addresses) (potential ARP problems) * and WDS does not suffer from it. Yes you will have 2 physical access points, but they will have the same SSID and your computers will roam between the two automatically (a draw back is that when your device is connected to the second WPS node, you get half of the bandwidth, this is easily fixable though with a virtual access point on the main router with a different ssid).

Edit: I just started using Tomato a couple of month ago, so I am not as familiar with it ( i've been using dd-wrt before for 5 years). I can see there's is Access Point + WDS mode and just WDS mode for wireless. My guess is that plain "WDS" doesn't actually create a separate AP. This option didn't exist in DD-WRT AFAIK (either that or I never really cared to find out if it did)