AirPort Extreme DHCP Wired Failure

[Crazy Badger]

During the night I had some issues on my network, which has taken the best part of the day to resolve.

Everything is back up and running now, but the only thing I can pin it down to is the failure of my AirPort Extreme to provide IP addresses via DHCP for WIRED ONLY connections. It's working fine as a switch, wireless access point and is still assigning IP addresses for wireless connections.

Anyone experience anything similar, or am I just being crazy? I didn't even think a device like this could partially fail, but continue to operate in other ways.

 

[2984839]

I know you said it works as a switch, but do all the ethernet ports continue to work or only some? What happens if you assign static IPs on the ethernet ports?

 

[Crazy Badger]

Yes, all the ports still seem to work, but I'm only using 2 - one from my ISP modem and another out to a bigger switch. Assigning static IP addresses to the devices works fine, but I have a few things that I can't manually configure and these are self-assigning IP addresses as it doesn't find a DHCP server.

I might be able to configure a DHCP server on my FreeNAS box, which will do for a few months until we start to see a better choice of WiFi6 devices.

 

[Crazy Badger]

Trying to get DHCP working on FreeNAS while the AirPort still did NAT defeated me, so I thought I'd bite the bullet and buy a new router. Afterall, I'd had the Airport for about 6+ years.

Long and short of it is the router wasn't the problem, and it was a managed switch on the network that was causing the problem. That's been removed and all my devices are now getting the right IP addresses.

 

[danmart]

Glad to hear you diagnosed your problem!

I didn't even think a device like this could partially fail, but continue to operate in other ways.

They certainly can, though modems are probably the most prone to this, in my experience. I’ve had three different modem-routers, over the years, burn out the side connected to the PSTN whilst the WiFi keeps performing fine. It can be very confusing until you have seen it a couple of times.

Bottom line: individual components can fail, but it’s usually easier to replace the whole device when that happens.