More than 253 WiFi clients

BTW found the command here.
http://www.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=315868&sid=0fd93522bacbb170e9fdb414bac53752

I would tend to keep to the byte boundaries, so make the subnet masks 255.255.0.0

Ok Craig,
I think I understand the issue I had with my command was the subnet.
Can you tell me if I should change lan to something else for instance br1?
This change actually effects 1 wired port a Vlan and 2 virtual WLAN which are all part of a br1.
BTW my other network is at 192.168.1.X and will never have many clients.

Arne,
Are you suggesting that I just set the subnet up for way more IPs than I need, and just go with a 0 instead of a 252 or 254 or anything like that? I don't really understand subnets very well. From what I've gathered it is what changes which parts of the ip change and how?

I don't know how fimiliar both of you are with DD-WRT but I really need help implimenting this on DD-WRT. It seems the dnsmasq will be specifying the same things that the DHCP server is already specifying but dnsmasq allows more conttrol or something.

Also how do I test this? Cnnecting 260 clients or so is not going to be a very convenient way to test it because that only happens about once a week.

beatified,

How do manage your APs? I have many APs as well but I need centralized management to scale?

harbor235 ;}

I don't really have a need for centralized management since I only have 3 AP's and I hwvent heard of anyway to manage large numbers of AP's. I don't think I can help you with that one I like the idea though.

It's fine to just change the subnet mask then if you want to do it that way.  You can do it my way, or Arne's way.  As long as you remember to exclude the IP of the router from being given to clients by DHCP you'll be fine.

If you go with Arne's suggestion you'll be able to use 10.0.0.1 - 10.0.255.255

yes, I'm suggesting making the subnets simple to view.

just because there is more "space" doesn't affect their usability, or affect performance, and for your size of network it would be the simplest method.

If you had 600 buildings in your network, then you might look at at using subnet masks that were not on byte boundaries, but for a single site with a single AP, I'd always keep things as simple as possible.

I would however add that performance with 250 plus connections such s smal number of APs is unlikely to be good...

I would also suggest that you spent some time on basic IPv4 principles, it will save you time in the long run and you will be able to understand instead of following "cookie cutter recipes" that may not fit your requirements.

As a general rule, if you do not understand what a change will do, you should not make the change, you are looking at changing the IP subnet, DHCP, DNS etc while knowing "not much" about any part, therefore the probability of an error occurring is higher, the error could be because you were not aware of something, or misunderstood something.

You could start by getting a test DD-WRT that you can reconfigure without affecting the live network and seeing how the changes work.

Yeah the router doesn't have a 10.10.10 ip at all.

Any direction on implimentation on DD-WRT?

If I had 1000 ip's available that would be enough. This is for a church's public WiFi so there can be a pretty large number of dhcp clients but close to no bandwidth usage.

Arne,
I totally agree that I need to learn a lot. I do have a test AP available and that is exactly how I was going to test. But I guess I understand enough to know that you cannot have two DHCP servers running at the same time. And right now I don't understand how to implement it because dnsmasq is not a DHCP server but both are setting a subnet. So I guess I'm just a little confused. I'm sure I can't have conflicting subnets either. Do I change my subnet under my bridge options as seen in my screenshot? I know I may not be the sharpest tool in the shed but this really how I learn. I get lost trying wade through books or what not. If I can understand not just what to do but why I did it I have a much deeper understanding of how I can use what I learned in other ways.

What IP does the router have at the moment on the br1 interface?

10.10.10.1 if you look at the screen shots above I believe its in the one labeled networking.

Ok, in post https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/28004840/More-than-253-WiFi-clients.html?anchorAnswerId=38811263#a38811263 you said you don't have a 10.10.10 address on the router!

If you DO have a 10.10.10 address on the router you will need to exclude it from the DHCP pool of assignable addresses.

Sorry what I ment was that the routers address is not 10.10.10.X its 192.168.1.1

There are 2 networks
Main router network 192.168.1.X
Public Network 10.10.10.X

what I was trying to say is that the routers ip wasnt in that range.

I just looked at the images...

Change the subnet mask on the networking page to 255.255.254.0 or 255.255.0.0
The 255.255.254.0 mask will give you 509 addresses and the 255.255.0.0 will give you 65533 addresses.

That's it!

The DHCP server should sort itself out and automatically expand its range.  If not just adjust it to whatever you want.

So your refering to the Subnet on the br1 interface I take it?

And should I ignore the dnsmasq? is that for the routers main network? not for an added netowrk?

Sorry you just said on the networking page that explains it.

So this is it?
Image-12.jpg

Settings seem to have taken I guess I'll see what happens.

Funny thing is I tried just that before but it kept messing stuff up. I have had trouble with firware not completely working before so maybe it was an issue with that particular ver.

Any tips on testing? I guess I could start my first ip really high?

It seems to have broken DNS router wide

Looks to have messed things up pretty bad??? well at least I backed it up before I made the change and rebooted.

Hmmm that shouldn't have killed anything.

When you applied the configuration could you get an IP address on a client PC?

Not sure teamviewer continued to work until I rebooted the router. I am on my way to the site now I will see if I am getting ip addresses on the clients. The weird thing is it broke the 192.168.1.X network as well not just the 10.10.10.X network.

Maybe it just wants a reboot?

Yeah I rebooted it remotely and it wouldn't allow me to connect via teamviewer anymore.

Just got to the site and its not assigning ip addresses anymore I have a feeling that is the issue. Some how dhcp broke I will try to verify by setting static ip and DNS.

Static didn't fix it. Oh well don't know where to go next any ideas?

If you manually put it back how it was before does it work?

Trying now. Rebooting.

Seems to not make a difference I will try to verify.

Before I could get into the web front end with a static address but now it isn't responding no matter what I do.

Reset and restore from backup?

Looked at the screen cap to make sure settings were the same as before rebooting now.

yep worked perfectly when I reverted the settings manually.

I think I had the subnet wrong and I also added the dnsnamsq options in the services tab. You can see the screen cap above.

This is what I did. Note I changed lan to br1.

Does this seem right?
Image-13.jpg

It seems the problem is when I set the number of leases to 500 on the bottom of the networking tab. cause I changed the subnet on its own and its still fine.

Yes the problem definately occurs when the max value is set to 500. I have it on 249 and it works fine.

Maybe it's a bug in the firmware.  The DHCP server might be thinking it can actually assign .500 as a valid IP?

Can you create a scope for 10.10.10.2 - 249 and a different scope for 10.10.11.2 - 249

I can try that. I'm just wondering if its going to create a DHCP conflict somehow? I guess theroretically it shouldn't but then the second part of the question becomes will it automatically start dishing out the .11.X ips after it finishes with the .10.X ips?