More wifi router weirdness

[Darwock]

Struggled with what should have been a simple task last night, replacing my 10+ year old buffalo air station with a comparatively new wifi router that we got as a freebie with a phone service a couple of years ago. I'm going to be using the vita link service more so wanted to give my network a boost.

I have actually solved the problem, but I would like to understand why it happened as I don't have the background knowledge..

My set up is a broadband modem->wired router (which I don't have admin access to, was provided by the phone company). As I don't have the necessary WAN credentials to just replace the wired router with a wireless one, I set up my buffalo as an AP and added it to one of the LAN ports on the router. This worked fine for years.

When I did the same with the new router (in AP mode) everything failed. My router/DNS server has an address of 192.168.24.1. The iPad would connect to the SSID but show 192.168.0.1 for the gateway. When I put this in to the browser I could change the settings on the web configuration page (obviously).

By switching the iPad from DHCP to manual, and putting in a fixed address and 192.168.24.1 for gateway and DNS server, it would then connect. So apparently something is wrong with the DHCP settings? Every device failed to connect unless I put in a manual address EXCEPT the PS4, which still got allocated it's address automatically. Why would this be? Limited address range? That has never happened before.

Also, I was unable to access the web configuration page unless I knocked the iPad back to DHCP so the address reverted to the wrong one, which I would then put into the browser. Surely this can't be right, it must be possible to access the settings when everything is working as it should? However if I put in the gateway address of 24.1 I get an error message (which I think is the 'no authorisation' message I get when I try to access the phone companies wired router) so it's like the wireless router has gone invisible. I did a network scan on my iPad but no other addresses show up.

It's weird to me that the client devices seem to be the ones dictating the rules, is this just a quirk of AP mode?

Help me understand bordersdown!

[charlesr]

You have 2 gateways. Throw everything apart from the modem away and get a decent wifi router that you have access to. Or get access to the one you have been given?

[Darwock]

Dealing with Japanese support just fills me with dread, and my wife gets angry after two seconds discussing anything PC related so I can't get her involved either without further massive headaches. It would be the ideal situation, but I would like to avoid causing more complications if possible.

(Edit - I should clarify, I can, quirks aside, access both old and new wireless routers that I have. I can't access the wired router, or find out my username/password etc for the WAN. Actually I vaguely recall when we got our current line installed I did attempt to do it properly, but getting Internet to actually work was an exercise in frustration and in the end I gave up and just added the wireless router as an AP. They charge to have someone come out and set it up and I was too stubborn to do that when I should be able to do it myself.)

I thought the kind of set-up I described in my first post was fairly commonly used? I mean using a wireless router in AP (or bridge) mode just to add a wireless access point to a wired network. And I thought putting it in that mode effectively stopped it acting as a gateway (hence my inability to access the configuration page when it's all working correctly).

Even if so, I'm puzzled as to why something which had worked for years, would stop suddenly when one component was swapped out for another that should be doing exactly the same thing.

[Darwock]

Yeah, I remember now.

I dug out all my old documentation which has the user IDs and passwords.

Put the new wifi router into router mode, and fed in all those details. No matter what I do it completely refuses to find a WAN IP address, everything remains at 0.0.0.0. So I gave up again and put it back into AP mode.