How do I put my NVG589 in bridge mode?

Hi Jeff, 

I appreciate all of your help on these forums.  I just got Uverse and have been reading extensively on how to network my new, extremely spacious home.

If I have a 3rd party router than I want to purely use as a Wireless Access Point, can I plug my wired set top box into that or does it need to go to the NVG589?  I only have one cat5e drop to where I want to put my Access point and is also where the wired set top box is.

Currently I have this set up in my basement media closet:

NVG589----->24 port Gigabit swith------->all rooms and set top boxes.

So in one of the up stairs rooms I would add my wireless access point then feed my wired set top box for that room (I am assuming the LAN ports on the AP would still work).

While some equipment may handle it properly, you normally don't want to connect both a piece of AT&T IPPV Equipment and a consumer Wireless Access Point/Router back to the same port of the RG.  I would even more stronly advise against hooking your IPTV gear so that the traffic has to pass through a consumer router.  Your proposed configuration would violate both of these maxims.

Consumer gear normally doesn't handle multicasts (in general) and IGMPv3 (to be more specific).  The Wireless Access Point sees multicast traffic and assumes that all ports and all wireless clients need to get it.  Since multicast traffic isn't compatible with retries, the wireless gear slows down a bunch to make sure the traffic gets there the first time and asserts flow control on the Ethernet side to make sure it doesn't get overloads.  This causes slow wireless traffic and messes up all IPTV on that leg from the RG.

I will say that I just ordered a moderately expensive consumer router that is supposed to handle IGMPv3 and the multicast traffic and I'm going to see how well it handles all this, but my expectations are not set very high.

Why do you need to multicast or IGRP at home?   I run a corporate data center.  First, I would not use Uverse or Comcrap in it.  I have AT&T fiber ethernet and 123.net ethernet for the two ISP connections. 

I am an electrical engineer with certs from Microsoft, Cisco, and Novell.  I have my CNE and took the Novell TCP/IP exams.  Possibly the 3rd worst test after Electromagnetics and Quantum Mechanics.  My old WOW! modem bridged to my Dlink with no problem.  Arris said it works with every other ISP except AT&T.  AT&T engineering uses binding in the box outside your home to link two copper pairs.  This breaks bridging.   AT&T IP passthrough only sends WAN IP, Subnet, and Gateway information not DNS.  

If you want to do WAP at home, get a Dlink router and repeater and follow my directions.  AT&T Arris wireless is off.   My Dlink DGL-4500 is in the basement on east side of the house and my Dlink Repeater on the first floor on west side of the house. Same information on both.  The ARRIS connects to the WAN port of the router.  The repeater is on the LAN port on a cable.  You can get a better dedicated WAP device with longer range for a business.  I use three HP WAPs in our building.   Not needed for home.  The coverage between the two Dlink devices is 200 foot and I lock it down for just our devices.  For most of the devices, I ran CAT 6 plenum grade cable for Gbps.   I hate wireless.   It is slow and flaky.   Only our smart phones and my wife's laptop are on it.  I am running a Cat 6 for her laptop this weekend. 

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@SCSIraidGURU wrote:

Why do you need to multicast or IGRP at home?   I run a corporate data center.  ...

 

I am an electrical engineer with certs from Microsoft, Cisco, and Novell.  I have my CNE and took the Novell TCP/IP exams....

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1) Read what I posted again: I didn't say IGRP, I said IGMP.  You'd expect someone with a CNE to know the difference. I'll leave why MediaRoom uses IGMP as an exercise for the reader.

2) I quit reading posts where people have to tell me how smart/qualified they are.  If I can't tell it from the posts, then, well...

Great instructions. It worked for me for the most part. My ATT Router was acting weird and not letting me save things etc. It was getting stuck. I had to repeat the passthrough mode section several times and restart several times. Then I couldn't get a broadband connection in my ATT Router and had to reset it and start all over again. My person router is the ASUS RT-AC87U and it seems to work fine at this point. One caveat to everyone...

When putting in your MAC address from your personal router, ATT would not save my MAC address unless I put colons in between every two numbers. So for example if my router MAC on the actual device was: AA11AA11AA11AA in order to add it to the ATT router Manual Entry textbox I had to put it in this format AA:11:AA:11:AA:11:AA. That was a big deal because it wouldn't let me save my MAC address (string length issue weirdness) and stopped me from moving forward. Once I got that piece done it was smooth sailing. 🙂  Thanks to the original poster for documenting this process. AT&T is not really helpful in this regard other than hosting this responses. 😞

I recently joined ATT uverse and received the Arris 599. While I am able to get Passthrough to work through to my Asus RT-N56U.None of my existing port rules are working. I have an external URL purchased so my wife can use that url to point back to all of the internal apps that I host. (Make things simple)

Problem 1:

When setting everything to default on the Arris 599 I setup port triggers. I am only able to hit 8080 from my local machine. 

When I use something outside of the network I am able to hit all of internal sites with various ports. 

- One would simply think this is a firewall issue on the local server. I removed all firewall rules to test and yet nothing works on any device connected to the network. 

Problem 2

Via passthrough 

When it is setup on the asus router I am able to connect to the internet just fine. Yet no apps on the network or outside can access the apps. 

When I was with my other cable provider I never had this many issues getting things up and running. I'm in IT but im not a networking wiz but I feel like this should not be this difficult. Any insight would be most appreciated. 

Arris is on 192.168.1 subnet 

Asus is on 192.168.2.1 subnet 

I can't get these instructions to work. I have an NVG599 rather than the 589, so I'm not sure if that's the difference or not. It seems very similar though. My issue happens early on during the very first section.The steps are:

First, I am connected via ethernet cable (I have wireless turned off), and my notebook is the only device connected, either via ethernet or wifi. 

• Login to your NVG589 by going to 192.168.1.254
• Go to 'Home Network' then 'Subnets & DHCP'.  Your password is on the side of the modem.
• If your 'Device IPv4 Address' is the same subnet as your local router, I suggest changing it.  I changed mine to 192.169.2.254 but you can stick with whatever you like / need.  My subnet Mask remains at 255.255.255.0
• Change 'DHCPv4 Start Address' to 192.169.2.1 (or whatever your above Device IPv4 address is but with a 1 at the end instead of .254)
• Change 'DHCPv4 End Address' to 192.169.2.5, Just a few more than the Start Address.  We need these for any WAP extenders for wifi TV's.  It's important that you only have the laptop plugged into the ethernet at this point.
• Click 'SAVE' at the bottom.

When I press "Save" it seems to just hang there. I've done this several times (after having to reset the device). I haven't ever been able to make it get past this step. I have tried following these directions exactly, and I have also tried it using 192.168.2.254 as the device address, and then making the appropriate adjustments when updating the start and end addresses. So what am I doing wrong? 

And then another (perhaps naive) question, but once I make that initial change, do I not have to log back in using the new address? It doesn't say that in the instructions, but I'm assuming that, if successful, the device is no longer 192.168.1.254, and needs to be logged in with whatever you're using. 

Thanks for any assistance on this.

Regards,

Samandnoah

The IP Passthrough instructions were perfect.  However, something I have ran into as a horrible side effect is that my service will eventually cease to work.  I will have to factory default the modem, call into support and have them send signals to my line etc.  They report that my modem is not communicating blah blah blah.  When I have IP Passthrough disabled this never happens.  AT&T support has sent 3 outside line technicians to my place and replaced the modem twice with regular home service technicians.  I am using a Sonicwall TZ210 as my router, this is basically for VPN stuff.  Has anyone here seen this?