I’m looking for some advice and support, excuse the lengthy explanation.
Here in rural part of the UK we rely on a wireless point to point internet connection, starlink was not available when we signed this contract, there has been recent performance issues and they have installed a new receiver dish and router in a higher location on the house.
Old Nokia Beacon 2 router has IP range of 192.168.18.x (class C) and has an existing mesh to improve wireless coverage through the house. I have many devices with fixed IP in this range, plus quite a few DHCP reservations for other devices.
New Nokia Beacon 6 has IP range of 192.168.1.x (class C), the engineers turned off the FHCP on the new router as they are happy for me to keep the old one too. I was thinking we could continue to use the old router for DHCP and mesh, not realising about the IP address differences. I was expecting to add the new one to existing mesh and disconnect old dish from Beacon 2.
I have raised a support ticket but slow to get any response. I was thinking could change both to class B and set old router to route out through 192.,168.1.1 for all traffic.
Alternatively, perhaps I can setup a DHCP server in HA and add all the reservations in manually (I grabbed some screenshots from the old Nokia).
Longer term may well get new Ubiquity access points and controller, which would allow multiple wireless networks including dedicated one for IoT. This could be many months away tho,
You do not sat how the two routers are cnnected.
Is it a double NAT setup or a network with two routes?
Also changing the network range does not exempt you from changing all the static assigned IPs, because the subnet mask will change and thereby the broadcast address.
Also be careful with setting up a dedicated IoT network.
It requires a pretty deep knowledge about protocols and not just network routing.
I am not sure how the new router works with the mesh, but you suggest you replace old router with the new one with settings that match the old one, like IP address and subnet mask, DHCP pool and reservation lists.
Page 68 at https://fccid.io/2ADZRHA0336GA/User-Manual/User-Manual-4707049 (funny that it isn’t easily found on the Nokia site direct) is where you can change your LAN parameters for the IP Range.
As @WallyR said, having two subnets on the same LAN is going to cause you all sorts of grief for IOT where HomeAssistant likes a flat network. Both routers can co-exist on the LAN, just leave the DHCP allocation to one only, and keep the IP static addresses in the appropriate range for the respective router, so they don’t step on each other.
The router is the place to do this, as this is where the network devices initially connect to to get an IP Address allocated, not HomeAssistant, which relies on the network address already being allocated at the other end (by the router) to talk to the remote device.
There is no issue with running the DHCP service at the home assistant server, instead of the router.
Just make sure the DHCP service is disabled at the router and that HA use a static IP address (not a DHCP address, neither a dynamic nor a reserved one).
Beware that if the power goes, then when power is restored HA might be slower to start up than some of your devices and these devices might not get a DHCP assigned address in the first round and you might have to manually reboot them for them to retry.
Also know that your router running as DHCP might have a featur that binds a device to a domain with the hostname the device present itself as. HA, might or might not, have this service too. I do not know that though.
The very reason why this is not really a very good idea. Every time the power is restored you have to go around and power cycle each device? All of them in the house? Naah - let the router do the allocating without manual intervention, or hard code the static IP Address into each device and skip the DHCP (dynamic allocation) process altogether.
192.168.18.x (class C) will support 255 device IP addresses. Sharing them between the two routers should be possible with a bit of thought and planning and careful configuration.
Even the router might be too slow to catch all devices, but some devices have a watchdog for this situation, like ESPHome devices that will normally fall back to an AP where the WiFi can be reconfigured, but if that does not happen then it will after a while reboot and retry to original settings.
Don’t worry about changing IP’s. You can continue using your old router. What you’ll want is to setup IP Passthrough. A quick Google search showed these instructions-
