Question How to persist DHCP reservations between reboots?

[stevecoh1]

I have a new Linksys AX5400 router on my home network. It offers the ability to set up DHCP reservations. But I have found that these reservations are lost upon a reboot of the router. I have also found no way to back up these settings so they may be restored after the reboot. Linksys tech support was completely useless. Their chat service wanted me to restore factory settings. They gave me the phone number for a "real engineer" who said, "just don't reboot the router." Is there really nothing better that can be done, or is there some trick to do this better than writing down a list of IP addresses and MAC addresses.

For example, is there some way to download these settings into a file? I run this router from Ubuntu Linux and am quite capable of using the command line if I knew what to tell the router to do. Linksys docs are completely silent on the question.

 

[COLGeek]

Why do you want to do this? Knowing that might help with possible options (like setting fixed IPs on those devices).

 

[stevecoh1]

Why do you want to do this? Knowing that might help with possible options (like setting fixed IPs on those devices).

I have my Ubuntu laptop on regular backups to an old desktop which is accessed by the backup program by an IP address. When the IP address changes, the backups fail.

However, I have just found the answer to my question, which the Linksys tech support and documentation didn't cover. There is a backup/restore option on the admin page of the router and it does include the reserved addresses.

 

[COLGeek]

Glad you sorted it out. Seems fixed IPs would be a better solution for that use.

 

[stevecoh1]

Glad you sorted it out. Seems fixed IPs would be a better solution for that use.

I had a great deal of difficulty setting up the static IP on the backup machine which runs a very old edition of Ubuntu (and will not support more recent versions), and getting it to work. DHCP reservation was much easier. When I tried to elicit help online for that situation, I got indignant replies like "how dare you run such a vulnerable system on your network and not keep it up to date with all the latest security patches." There are many network admins who don't understand the realities of home networking on a budget. The backup machine is used only for backup, otherwise it would not be on my system.

 

[COLGeek]

Odd. Setting a fixed/static IP on any Linux system is generally a trivial task.

Still you have a working solution. Well done.