Router assigns IP addresses outside of the network range

[hij2001]

My original wifi infrastructure had two wireless routers, one configured as an AP connected by ethernet to the primary router.  this worked fine for years, but my primary router started to fail so I replaced that with another brand.  When I configured the new router, it assigned IP addresses starting with 10.x.x.x rather than 192.168.1.x as is customary.  When I had problems with that router and a second brand, I decided to switch to Google Nest mesh.  Sounds like everything should be great, right?

Unfortunately for some reason, when new devices are added to the wifi, many of them connect to the network but with an out of range IP address based on the previous router, so while they are connected to the radio, they have no internet access nor are they visible on the network in the correct address range.  My two nest thermostats fall into this category.  For all of my other devices affected by this issue, I've gone in to manually set the IPV4 address, DNS server and router addresses, and they were able to connect.  I've repeatedly "successfully" configured the thermostat wifi, but they remain invisible to the app, nest services, and my network.  Isuspect they are configured in this alternative address space.

In troubleshooting this, I found that the thermostat wifi configuration can be manually set using the google home app, but unfortunately since they are on a "different" network, they can't be accessed.  How can this be resolved?  I've posted this in the thermostat community as well, but the router DHCP miss assigning addresses is of course the root cause of the problem.

Thanks for any assistance you can provide!

Regards,

Howard

[hij2001]

Thanks to a very prompt response by kiltguy2112 yesterday to my similar post in the Thermostats community, I was able to make my invisible "offline" thermostats visible to my network and online once again.  The solution was to reserve an IP address in the router based on the MAC address of each thermostat and restarting them without clearing all data which brought them into the proper net and subnet for my network. 
While this solved my problem for the thermostats and some other devices which were similarly assigned an out of range IP address, it still requires manual intervention beyond providing the SSID and password for wireless network access, when the router should take care of this "automagically". 

Any suggestions to get the router to work as expected would be sincerely appreciated!

Thanks and regards,

Howard

[hij2001]

Today's update. 

I just tried to add two AV devices to my Nest wifi network. The older blue ray player required me to painfully enter my complex 20 character encryption key one character at a time, and I had to do it more than once. When it attempted to connect, it was successful in attaching to the access point, but without internet access, so it failed and I was unable to see the assigned IP or MAC address. I retried after that with variations on the encryption type (it had three options that included "WPA") and I finally got it to connect with an IP address in the proper range.

My newer AV receiver had what looked like a great interface where it had a wireless AP to which I could connect and easily configure the setup through my iPhone, and it appeared to go very successfully on the first attempt, but the router assigned an IP address and associated router and DNS server addresses of the following, which of course was completely different than my 192.168.86.xxx network, so the receiver IP address was out of range and was unable to access the internet.

IP: 10.0.1.19

Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.0

Gateway & DNS servers: 10.0.1.1

 But in this case, when I scanned my network to determine the MAC address for which I could create a reservation, the receiver was not visible on my network, so I needed to manually set a fixed IP address and the associated DNS and router parameters after which the AV receiver had access.

In all my years of setting up and maintaining networks, I have NEVER encountered anything like this situation!!! How does the router assign addresses completely unrelated to the network that it created??? And most importantly, how can this issue be resolved?

[hij2001 · Accepted solution]

I resolved the IP out of range assignment issue.  I use an Apple TimeCapsule as my local backup for both our PC and Mac systems.  I had always attached it via ethernet in my prior wifi system which had a total of 7 available ethernet ports, and it always appeared within the IP address range of my wireless network. Since there is one ethernet port available on the Nest router, I used that for my TimeCapsule.

I later noticed that it wasn't visible during my wireless network scans, even though it was accessible and functioning properly.  I used Airport Utility to check the IP configuration and found that its IP address was not in the 192.168.86.xxx range of my wireless network, but was 10.0.1.11 - in the range of the IP addresses that were assigned to new wireless devices around half the time.  I unplugged the ethernet cable from the router and reconfigured the Time Capsule to connect over Wifi, which put its IP address within my wireless network range and enabled me to add other wireless devices with the expected SSID and wireless password process.  I removed the three DHCP IP Reservations suggested by @kiltguy2112 and all IP addresses now resolve properly.

While my problem is resolved, this appears to be a design issue for the Nest router, and the ethernet port should apparently NOT be used if you want a normally functioning wifi network.  I had a support call with Nest yesterday but the first level support was of no help so I had him escalate the issue to second level support, and they will call me back in the next couple of days.  I will share this with them, see what they say, and post their response here.

[Jeff]

Hello, hij2001.

Thanks for sharing your fix and how you got to that point. It looks like you went deep into details so others can really understand what you needed to do in order to fix the issues. I just wanted to check in to see if you needed anything else here or if you had any questions. If you need anything else, just let me know.

Thanks.

[hij2001]

Jeff -

thanks for the kind words and follow up. My network is fully functional including the time capsule which is once again connected to the Ethernet port, so no further assistance is required. 
That’s a good thing since as expected, I never heard back from second level support. 

[Jeff]

Thanks for letting me know, hij2001. If you need anything else going forward, please feel free to open up a new thread. I'll go ahead and mark this one as resolved for now.

Thanks!