networking

[rchawla80]

Hi everyone,

I need some general networking advice and I am hoping a network guru can help me. My house has one HC300 with 4 HTC's and 1 media controller. The config is as follows:

Speedtouch ADSL Model -- wired to DLINK - DIR-655 Wireless N Router (upstairs)

Dlink switch downstairs (Cat5e) from above attached to Apple Airport Extreme N Router (running as bridge) - broadcasting on another SSID

All the other HTC's are wired directly from the DIR-655 Wireless N Router

1 HTC is through a Linksys Wireless B bridge (as the room as know ethernet).

My question is simple, what can I do to improve network latency and speed. I want to be able to add more network devices (media center pc's, extenders, other devices) but often at times my Control4 has latency issues with music not synching at what not. I am running an HC300 so that should have resolved all hardware issues and I am running the latest version.

Any help and thoughts are appreciated ...

Thanks

R

[inELEC]

Do you use fixed ip-addresses for all equipment? How are gateways configured? And DNS? On what channels are the 2 AP's running?

Joachim

[rchawla80]

Hi there,

No, all devices are dynamic as per my dealer. I have removed the NAS device as when we streamed from it, it caused a lot of sync issues in different zones. Even from the media contorller sometimes, I get delays. and sometimes it works perfectly, really weird.

AP devices? I wouldn't mind having a chat with a network expert, are you avaliable to speak?

Thanks

[thecodeman]

Well, first thing you need to do is change all the IP addresses to static, that will fix some of the instability.

AP = wireless access points, do you know what channel they are broadcasting on?

[inELEC]

You mean by phone? No problems, although that might cost you, it's the european Belgium where I am

Quite late here now, but tomorrow would be possible... in what time zone are you?

Joachim

[AndersE]

The SpeedTouch ADSL modem/router is with 99,99756% certanty the problem. Without static IP's on every component in the house (including your computers) it will create problems.

Firewalls and the SpeedTouch is also a major problem, but giving static IP's should solve it.

[rchawla80]

The speedtouch modem is just a modem, and it routes to a gigabit n router... so I doubt its just the modem, as bandwidth from the internet is not a problem!

[thecodeman]

But still, static IPs should be assigned for every IP piece of gear on your network. I had the DIR 655 before my ATT Uverse install, and didnt have any issues with it and static IPs.

[Guest mlund]

Converting to static addresses won't improve or hurt music synching issues. Adding devices to your network is also unlikely to hurt things any further unless you really start to push it on your wireless bandwidth.

[neil12011]

I had issues when we used the 665's. Never with latency though.

[capww8]

I assume the wireless HTC isn't doing anything but providing a GUI to a local display?

My money is on the switch / router combo. Buy a serious switch, something commercial grade, and let that handle the traffic (put all components on the switch). Let the router simply provide WAN.

I disagree that static is strictly necessary on all components, that's not an extremely large overly complex system, and the C4 gear should have no problem finding each other on the network (unless of course there are IP address conflicts). That said, it wouldn't hurt anything to relocate all the gear to static addressed outside the DHCP range...

[thecodeman]

I disagree that static is strictly necessary on all components, that's not an extremely large overly complex system, and the C4 gear should have no problem finding each other on the network (unless of course there are IP address conflicts). That said, it wouldn't hurt anything to relocate all the gear to static addressed outside the DHCP range...

I come from a networking / sysadmin background, and static IP addresses are just a good habit. Up until the latest release there were some issues with C4 gear getting correct DHCP information from some routers - a non-issue if you used static IPs

[capww8]

I think we're more or less in the same boat here thecodeman... It's certainly a good habit to have all devices on static (and I do in all of my installs), but personally, I don't think that's the reason for the trouble he's seeing here.

[thecodeman]

I think we're more or less in the same boat here thecodeman... It's certainly a good habit to have all devices on static (and I do in all of my installs), but personally, I don't think that's the reason for the trouble he's seeing here.

No, just in general.

[jralime]

I think we're more or less in the same boat here thecodeman... It's certainly a good habit to have all devices on static (and I do in all of my installs)' date=' but personally, I don't think that's the reason for the trouble he's seeing here.[/quote']

No, just in general.

While I agree that with a smaller system like this static DHCP shouldn't be much of a problem, I do have to throw out there that I have seen some drastic improvement even on small systems like this simply by switching to static IPs. Especially when there is a wireless bridge in the mix. I think it more likely that the problems are being caused by the switch or router or both. But overall static IPs can often help in systems with router/switch issues (not fix the problem, but help)

Robert

[CFUG]

^What? If you have a router and a switch, one or the other is serving DHCP- not both. This is critical. Then you can set statics for things like controllers/gadgets. The 7" WiFi could care less if it's on static or dynamic. If your switch/router is assigning local IPs, they aren't gonna change like your your WAN IP will. This topic is highly overrated!!!

[thecodeman]

^What? If you have a router and a switch, one or the other is serving DHCP- not both. This is critical. Then you can set statics for things like controllers/gadgets. The 7" WiFi could care less if it's on static or dynamic. If your switch/router is assigning local IPs, they aren't gonna change like your your WAN IP will. This topic is highly overrated!!!

I've encountered a few setups that have seen both the router and the wireless AP serving DHCP - a no-no.

[hakalugi]

hi

is this still an issue? (or did static IPs solve it)

from your description i can't tell if the upper floor gear is ethernet wired to the lower gear or using a wifi bridge ("DIR-655 Wireless N Router (upstairs)

Dlink switch downstairs (Cat5e) from above attached to Apple Airport Extreme N Router (running as bridge) - broadcasting on another SSID")

maybe you mean wired and you misused 'bridge' - a bridge in wifi parlance is when you connect 2 APs (access points) to connect only to eachother (you enter in the others' mac address) and they literally bridge via radio a gap between them with wifi. they are on the same subnet and pass the traffic without changing IP source/destination addresses. they usually have static IP addressses (definitely the far side one).

maybe you meant "...from above attached to Apple Airport Extreme N Router (running as an *access point*)" if you were running it as a bridge, you'd need a 3rd AP also in bridge mode....

i think thats where the codeman has seen more than 1 dhcp server, when the router/gateway (ie: befsr41 is the classic) and a wrt54g/airport are both "in gateway mode" and giving out IPs, but sounds like you're not in gateway mode. i've seen airports and other 'gateway' devices revert back to being full router/gateways after bad power outages/fluxes, so be mindful, you're likely better off with a pure AP in that role.

also why a different ssid? why not same ssid and wpa psk on different channel?

anyways, if it still persists, reply back. I'm new to community and want to build up some karma, and am a network engineer by day...

[EagleMoon]

from your description i can't tell if the upper floor gear is ethernet wired to the lower gear or using a wifi bridge ("DIR-655 Wireless N Router (upstairs)

Dlink switch downstairs (Cat5e) from above attached to Apple Airport Extreme N Router (running as bridge) - broadcasting on another SSID")

maybe you mean wired and you misused 'bridge' - a bridge in wifi parlance is when you connect 2 APs (access points) to connect only to eachother (you enter in the others' mac address) and they literally bridge via radio a gap between them with wifi. they are on the same subnet and pass the traffic without changing IP source/destination addresses. they usually have static IP addressses (definitely the far side one).

maybe you meant "...from above attached to Apple Airport Extreme N Router (running as an *access point*)"

Apple Airports have a mode that Apple generally calls "Bridge Mode". That turns it into an AP by turning off DHCP and NAT. In my AirportExpress here, it's under "Internet --> Internet Connection --> Connection Sharing" and is labeled "Off (Bridge Mode)". My TimeCapsule is at the other house and I can't check the specifics on it but I know it's similar.

On a separate note, have you found a "wireless bridge" that will reliably support multiple MAC addresses behind it? Nitty-gritty details of wireless is not my area, but my understanding is that 802.11 spec does not officially support multiple MACs from a single wireless client interface. Does WDS fix that? I wonder if that might be related to some people's instability problems. I know I've never gotten it to work reliably and have given up on wireless bridging at home.

On a third note, all this talk here and elsewhere about static vs dynamic IP addresses is at best misleading. Short of possibly some kind of serious bug in some very old equipment's TCP/IP stack, there is absolutely no difference in operation between using DHCP vs Static addresses. If using static addresses seems to make things more stable, then you almost certainly have an underlying network problem that you merely covered up by setting static addresses. You likely have a network problem that was interfering with the DHCP process. Setting a static address did not fix that problem, it made it less obvious. (Caveat: it is possible that there was a poorly-implemented DHCP server, not a network problem.)

[tigrzeye]

Using Static IP addresses. In cases where it is necessary to know the exact IP address

every time for any given device, use static IP addresses. Static IP addresses are manually

assigned. As a rule, Control4 does not recommend static IP addresses because it is too easy

to add duplicate IP addresses to the network.

Edit: Thought I remembered this from Tech I, so looked it up to refresh my memory.

[GoGo Delicious]

Here is a an old document that I wrote that shows how to setup Apples Airport Extreme in WDS mode. I am posting this as more of an FYI as it's an old doc that has not been updated in about 2 or 3 years.

[hakalugi]

Apple Airports have a mode that Apple generally calls "Bridge Mode". That turns it into an AP by turning off DHCP and NAT. In my AirportExpress here, it's under "Internet --> Internet Connection --> Connection Sharing" and is labeled "Off (Bridge Mode)". My TimeCapsule is at the other house and I can't check the specifics on it but I know it's similar.

yeah, i have 2 airport expresses, purely for pushing music to systems from our macs, so i forgot the apple-ese equivalent; but industry wide, that's AP mode, bridge is understood to be what i described and what you know about based on your question...

On a separate note, have you found a "wireless bridge" that will reliably support multiple MAC addresses behind it? Nitty-gritty details of wireless is not my area, but my understanding is that 802.11 spec does not officially support multiple MACs from a single wireless client interface. Does WDS fix that? I wonder if that might be related to some people's instability problems. I know I've never gotten it to work reliably and have given up on wireless bridging at home.

no idea if WDS makes a difference, but i have gotten it to work with 2 different product lines. 1: very much a higher end infrastructure product by proxim connecting 2 buildings on a campus, but they're purpose built for that. 2: using HP 420na APs. these are real sleepers, i love these: poe, plenum rated, multiple SSID, multiple vlans, multiple encryption levels supported, snmp monitoring, syslog out, and telnet config for easy backup and loads. they've been replaced by newer hp ap's, but snatch these up. especially if the previous owner hasn't had any service calls, since they carry a lifetime warranty without the need for smartnet, etc. i have bridged at 2 different client sites using these with multiple PCs, ip printer, laptops on the far side (to an older part of a building with no ethernet and they rejected gaffers tape ), and at my home, i have an hp420 to hp420 pair bridging and on the far side are 2 devices: an ip camera and the ip card in my apc ups feeding the camera and far side AP/bridge.

On a third note, all this talk here and elsewhere about static vs dynamic IP addresses is at best misleading. Short of possibly some kind of serious bug in some very old equipment's TCP/IP stack, there is absolutely no difference in operation between using DHCP vs Static addresses. If using static addresses seems to make things more stable, then you almost certainly have an underlying network problem that you merely covered up by setting static addresses. You likely have a network problem that was interfering with the DHCP process. Setting a static address did not fix that problem, it made it less obvious. (Caveat: it is possible that there was a poorly-implemented DHCP server, not a network problem.)

there you go, you nailed it. the traditional "routers" most soho's have are really 5 devices:

1) router

2) firewall

3) switch

4) access point

5) dhcp server (and more)

i find that buggy firmwares can cause dhcp to be an issue, overloaded cpu/memory from the ips/antivirus can cause the 'network services' to also not reply to the dhcp request cleanly.

they way i do it (networking things i /really/ want to have a known IP address) is that on the device, i set it to be static with the parameters i want, *and* i setup a dhcp reservation on the gateway/router/server that would give that device the same IP if it reverted to 'dhcp client' after an odd reboot or something.

and as to keeping track of IP addresses... well, it's documentation only. if you need to do a scan and see what's on a given subnet, the free version of this tool by solarwinds is great for that: http://www.solarwinds.com/products/freetools/ip_address_tracker/ the paid one will 'run and keep an eye out' and 'track' IPs, but for a quick scan which will dump to a spreadsheet noting mac, hostname, etc, this is free and it works.

[thinslis]

Using Static IP addresses. In cases where it is necessary to know the exact IP address

every time for any given device, use static IP addresses. Static IP addresses are manually

assigned. As a rule, Control4 does not recommend static IP addresses because it is too easy

to add duplicate IP addresses to the network.

Edit: Thought I remembered this from Tech I, so looked it up to refresh my memory.

Documentation is KING.

When assigning static IP addresses you should ALWAYS document what device is using what IP address.

You should be able to enter static entries into your DHCP server. So you set your device to Manual IP, enter the IP, then in the DHCP server enter the device name and MAC address into the DHCP server. This reserves the IP for the device while the device has the address hard coded.

[dgbrown]

For anyone that's looking. There's a free tool from Solorwinds available for tracking your IP space: http://www.solarwinds.com/register/registration.aspx?program=912&c=70150000000Ehqn&CMP=EMC-DCE-SWI-FTF_IPAT-IPAT-DL&elq=478acbf0b6164ee78127694ea75027e3

[Tokead]

Somewhat of a related question:

All my C4 gear has static addresses. They are outside the DHCP range. Over the last couple of days, my HC1000 has been getting a different IP. This has been causing conflicts and shutting the system down. How can it be getting a different IP when it was assigned a static IP through Pro > Systems tools?