[SOLVED] Wireless Point to Point System

danthemgman

Honorable
Mar 31, 2016
4
0
10,510
I have a fairly robust home network in my house, which is where the fiber line from my ISP enters my network. I have two outbuildings which are too far away to trench an ethernet line to. My solutions was to get 3 x TP Link CPE510 wireless point to point antennas. These just plug into my switch in the house, and the switch in the outbuilding. I set this up a while ago, so I'm not sure about all of the settings I tweaked in the actual antennas to get it to work properly. The system seems to be working flawlessly though.

My question is this:

Why can I not find an IP address ANYWHERE on the network to login to the two outbuilding antennas? I have tried to find them in the client list of my router. I have tried running "arp -a" commands in each of the outbuildings. I have tried to find them using a "tracert" command.

I can login to the antenna on the house using it's IP address (which I was able to locate in the client list of my router) and web interface. When I log into the house antenna, I can see that the other two are online. They are listed under "Stations". I can see their MAC addresses, but it has nothing listed for the IP addresses. See the picture below.

e48MpFj.jpg


The antenna on the house is configured as an "Access Point". To the best of my knowledge, the other two antennas are configured as "Client".

So, to review. I am able to access my "Access Point" antenna, but I cannot seem to find the IP addresses to access my two "Client" antennas.
 
Solution
Unless you set the IP addresses it likely is still using the default.

A couple of problems. First all 3 devices likely use the same IP address if you are using the default. Next many of these device do not use the same subnet as your common routers mostly to avoid IP address conflicts.

So your best option is to reset them and assign each a proper IP within your current network. Now you might be able to unplug 2 and then change the ip on your pc to be in the other subnet. You might be able to then change the ip to the other subnet.

Now maybe there is a utility that allows you to access them via the mac address. This is how you configure things like powerline adapters.
Maybe these devices don't respont to ICMP?
Some wireless devices require a special software to communicate/configure. Could you have used that when they were first configured?

If it's a /24 network you could try browsing to every IP. It may take some time but not that long.
Also, remember that some of these types of devices will only communicate on specific ports. Have you looked that up?
 

danthemgman

Honorable
Mar 31, 2016
4
0
10,510
Maybe these devices don't respont to ICMP?
Some wireless devices require a special software to communicate/configure. Could you have used that when they were first configured?

If it's a /24 network you could try browsing to every IP. It may take some time but not that long.
Also, remember that some of these types of devices will only communicate on specific ports. Have you looked that up?
If my memory is correct, I configured these devices using the web interface and default IP address. Once I set them as client and they were operational, that was when I lost access to them. At the time, I didn't care, because they worked. The only thing I can think of is to reset them to factory default, and reconfigure them. The problem with this is that I think I will run into the same problem again in the future.

I have not looked into specific ports, but the one I can access should be utilizing the same port correct? So that shouldn't be the issue.

Why would it not list an IP address on that photo I showed?

I'm really not looking forward to browsing to every IP address, and I think that may be fruitless anyway.
 
Unless you set the IP addresses it likely is still using the default.

A couple of problems. First all 3 devices likely use the same IP address if you are using the default. Next many of these device do not use the same subnet as your common routers mostly to avoid IP address conflicts.

So your best option is to reset them and assign each a proper IP within your current network. Now you might be able to unplug 2 and then change the ip on your pc to be in the other subnet. You might be able to then change the ip to the other subnet.

Now maybe there is a utility that allows you to access them via the mac address. This is how you configure things like powerline adapters.
 
Solution