Anyone have experience with DD-WRT?

[Vertigo 7]

I posted on the DD-WRT forums, but thought I'd hedge my bets and hope someone here may can shed some light.

So until today, I've been using the ASUS firmware on my RT-AC88U. I'd been eyeballing DD-WRT for some time and as my IOT collection grows, I've been wanting to segment them off in their own little IOT subnet.

Anywho... so I got the latest build flashed to my router. I've been using Server 2016 DHCP and DNS servers for quite some time. So got the basics configured in DD-WRT, setting the routers IP, disabled DHCP on the router, setup SSID's, etc. All basic configs, no vlans yet, just defaults.

Anyway I cannot get an IP assigned anymore. I can use static IPs and that works fine. I can ping the DHCP server and even RDP into it. But nothing on my network using the DHCP client is able to pull an IP addy any longer. I have no clue what's going on. My best guess is something in the router is blocking the DHCP acknowledgements from the server.

Btw, if I turn on the DHCP server on the router, I get IPs.

I can flash back to ASUS's firmware if DD-WRT is just broken but I didn't see any indication others were having this issue.

[red assassin]

Pretty sure I've had effectively this setup in the past, but I haven't used DD-WRT in literally years so I'm not sure how relevant that is. Usual troubleshooting steps I guess - I'd run tcpdump off the router to verify where the packets are going AWOL first.

[Vertigo 7]

Well, there's something more funky going on than I initially thought. I can ping devices across the wired side of the network and ping wired devices from the wireless side, but the wired side has no gateway access, even with static addressing and still no dhcp from the server.

[Vertigo 7]

I gave up and I'm reverting. Dunno wth was going on with this but I can't have my network in this state come monday morning.

[Vertigo 7]

I did end up trying again and managed to get it to work and I've started even segmenting out my network with much success.

I am curious about something, though.

So say each LAN port is on a different subnet. For the sake of simplicity, say port 1-4 are on 192.168.1.x/24 - 192.168.4.x/24.

If I were to make use of a layer 2 managed switch, am I correct in thinking that I would have to tag the VLAN on each port of the router separately (10, 20, 30, 40, for example) and subsequently tag 4 ports on a switch with the same tags and connect to each port to extend the subnets on one switch?

[Vertigo 7]

Yeah, so... newp, not even close. VLAN trunks carry all the tagged VLAN traffic without needing to create separate uplinks for each VLAN. I knew that but for some reason it escaped muh brain.

Anywho, decided to scrap DD-WRT all together and invested a bit into some Ubiquiti gear. Bought a new router, PoE switch, and a couple of access points.

I've probably gone a bit overboard with my VLAN setup but w/e. 6 VLANS and a rethinking of my WiFi setup, I've isolated all of my stand alone IoT devices, my homekit IoT devices, gaming systems, media systems, network services, and desktop devices and firewalled the VLANS off from each other except where necessary.

Fun project! And now that I've done the logical configuration, my next step will be the physical and do some major rewiring and snag myself a decent server rack. Can't wait to go crawling around in my attic

[red assassin]

Yep, that's definitely overkill. I'm actually back on DD-WRT now after getting annoyed with the foibles of my ISP provided router and buying a half decent one instead, but I don't have any fiddly additional setup on it. Everything is on the same VLAN, I don't really have IoT devices, and all my servers are cloud other than a single Raspberry Pi that handles anything I actually need on site. I suppose my TV has "smart" features and god knows if that's getting patches or anything, so it might be nice to segregate that off from everything else, but I'm not sure I can be bothered. I have very much an "if it ain't broke" approach to home computing these days.