Is it possible to add a route 10 lan port to an existing vlan without using the wan ports? IOW, since I am having some issues figuring out the alta universe, I would like to connect a route 10 to an existing network and configure it BEFORE adding it to the edge of a network. Since I have tried this for several hours and it keeps changing configs - I thought it would be prudent to ask here. If so, could someone point me to instructions? Thanks
Mine’s currently a paperweight. It would be nice to utilize the Route10 as a core switch instead of a router.
You can just plug your current network into the wan. Plug a laptop or something into one of the lan ports on the route10 and setup in manage.alta.inc. I’ve done this many times when provisioning equipment.
Thanks. Yeah I tried that last night and it worked but it’s causing some problems with the network I’ve got to troubleshoot.
Well that didn’t work!! I connected the R10 to a vlan on my network using DHCP. My network was great until it wasn’t! I have a public IP and somehow the active router on this network created a route for a public IP in the same subnet as my public - which I don’t own - and it locked the network up. I’m not sure the R10 had anything to do with it but it has NEVER happened in 30 years of doing this!!! So I will pull the R10 for the time being.
We would need a lot more information on your network in order to understand what’s going on. Is that something you can provide? Did you plug the LAN port of the Route10 into your network’s VLANs? Were you wanting it to serve up DHCP on that VLAN? What kind of connection did you give the Route10’s WAN port?
The two outer ports(left and right) are both WAN ports WAN1/WAN2.. connect a switch port or router port to wan1 and then it will connect to the cloud and you grab it into the alta manage controller in the cloud. Everything connected to the inner ports of the route 10 are LAN and will operate as such. What it sounds like you did was hooked the route 10 by one of the inner ports of the switch which would make the route 10 a DHCP server among other things and start trying to manage the network as a normal router. You can’t have two gateways so that would fail horribly. Most consumer routers are smart enough to see this and if they see another device trying to take the same gateway IP the consumer router will move it’s subnet.
@Alta-Jeff - thanks for your response! I would be glad to give specifics and since I don’t quite understand the Alta ecosystem yet, you can tell me where I went wrong.
I started by adding an AP6 to a semi-enterprise network. It has a core switch for routing and DHCP and 2 distribution switches off that and other smaller switches with many vlans.. The router on this network only handles internet/firewall.
Since I wasn’t using vlan 1 - I added it with a static ip on the core and a DHCP scope. I added the AP6 and it appeared on the cloud account and I was able to configure it as a previous post stated. That was working well. I thought I would just add the R10 to the network to have access to it so I could take my time configuring it. I plugged into a LAN port and vlan 1 and changed the 192 network to match the vlan 1 on my system. I gave the vlan 1 on R10 a static address in the subnet and turned off DHCP on it but I could not get access to it from the cloud account and the AP6 starting giving me problems. I could connect to the AP but it showed “disconnected” on the cloud. I unplugged the R10 and restarted the AP and everything was working fine.
Then I tried what @Jerky_san mentioned and connected a WAN port to another vlan (100) using DHCP on my system and it got an IP. Both devices show on the cloud and I thought everything was great! This is probably the mistake I made - I connected a LAN port to the vlan 1 on my system and left. Yesterday the entire network was down (very unhappy people) and I noticed that there were 2 public IP addresses on the edge router connected to the internet!! One of them I don’t own. So I pulled the R10 and restarted the AP and it has been fine for 36 hours.
I guess my question to you is - can I add this R10 to my network so I can access it and configure it without disrupting anything else? I noticed you have a pretty nice VPN in R10 and I thought maybe I could use it until I’m ready to switch over. I’m really intrigued by Alta products and I like what I see so far - but I need to learn more before deploying any more of them.
When you plugged the cable from VLAN 100 into the WAN port on the Route10, what IP address did the WAN interface receive?
If you’re setting this up from inside your network, the WAN port on the Route10 should be getting an internal/private IP address (something like 192.168.x.x, 10.x.x.x, or 172.16–31.x.x), not a public IP.
It was an address in the 10.10.100.0/24 subnet. I may try it again and jot down what the exact IP is.
When you connect it to your wan 1 on the route 10 you then can configure it via the cloud. You don’t need to connect it to your lan..if you want to you need to disable dhcp on the route 10
I plugged the WAN port of the R10 into my vlan 100. It got an IP of 10.10.100.27 and connected to the cloud account. The LAN ports picked up the vlan 1 on the cloud account and are showing the IP I configured there. It appears to be stable for the time being.
I still don’t understand why I can’t plug a LAN port into my vlan 1 and the AP and R10 pass traffic. The DHCP server is turned off on the R10 and it has a IP in the 10.10.1.0/26 subnet which is vlan 1 on my system. The AP gets an IP from that subnet from the main DHCP server. If I plug both of them into vlan 1 - they disconnect from the cloud.
What I did was the following:
- Connect the R10 WAN1 port to my existing infra, default it’s set for DHCP so WAN1 will get an IP from your existing router/DHCP.
- Connect an AP to one of the POE ports, which will be provisioned by the R10 DHCP.
- This will allow you to connect to the R10, and/or connect to the (Cloud) Control to configure it.
Once that is done, I changed LAN1 to a WAN port with DHCP, moved the cable from WAN1 to LAN1.
When that is done you can configure the WAN1 for whatever it needs for your ISP. In my case PPPoE.
This will give you a clean separation between your existing infra and whatever is behind the R10.
Thanks @mischa I will give it a try.
I connected the route 10 wan port to an existing vlan on my system. It connected and appeared on the cloud account. I then plugged the AP6 into a POE port and it showed connected on the cloud account. The only problem is the port blinks for several seconds and goes off therefore the ap gets no power or network connection. I rebooted many times and reset the R10 to no avail! May it’s defective?