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Address Reservation on Netgear Nighthawk

  • 12 December 2021
  • 7 replies
  • 730 views

I am not sure which is more annoying, Sonos or Netgear. Neither offer a user friendly experience but I am learning a lot about both trying to get them to get along together.

My Sonos system (S1) regularly drops rooms and skips through songs on Deezer. A new device connecting to the router is enough to start Sonos acting up e.g. someone arrives at the house and their phone connects to WIFI. 

I read disconnecting the bridge helps - done, and some improvement. I read reserving IP addresses helps, so I began the process through the router web GUI. After adding a few of the SONOS components, it became obvious that the device name could not include spaces or punctuation.

I then found I could not enter any device without a “invalid name” response. In desperation, I deleted all the previous reservations. but I still received the invalid name, even for devices that had been added without issue before.

I then remembered I had changed the router name to “Loft Router”. I tried removing the space and hey presto, I can now add devices to the address reservation again. 

If you are suffering with the “invalid name” issue, check the actual router name does not contain spaces or punctuation to. 

I guess it would be easier if Netgear got their act together and issued an update but I wouldn’t hold your breath.

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7 replies

ratty

The device name is irrelevant. Reservation in a DHCP server is by defining a fixed mapping between a MAC address and an IP address.  

Stanley_4
Userlevel 7
Badge +22

Look at it as two processes the router maker has jammed onto one screen.

The IP reservation, IP and MAC, are sent to the DHCP server.

The DNS record, IP and name, are sent to the DNS system.

You can technically have both, either or neither, what the router maker allows may be different.

buzz

I’m not familiar with the Nighthawk. With other routers I’ve seen issues with “names”. In terms of DHCP reservations the most important parts are the IP address and MAC address, however, some routers allow a user friendly name to be added. The friendly name will be displayed in lists, usually replacing the MAC Address. I have seen some routers reject spaces and special characters in these friendly names. If the router supports friendly names in the reservations I like to insert the SONOS Room name, but I may need to use some underscores and there might be number of character limits. A typical friendly name could become: SONOS_Kitchen.

Setting up reservations has been a slow process for every router that I’ve encountered and most will not allow editing of an entry. One must delete the entry rather than edit.

In any case it is well worth your trouble to reserve addresses for all regular clients. Lots of ill defined issues go away after reservations.

Stanley_4
Userlevel 7
Badge +22

If your system allows friendly names then you need to go with what your user manual or their support suggests. If you are entering a name to be passed to the router’s DNS server for use in resolving IPs to names then you are stuck with the DNS naming rules.

 

http://www.tcpipguide.com/free/t_DNSLabelsNamesandSyntaxRules.htm


Naming in DNS begins with giving each domain, or node, in the DNS name space a text label. The label identifies the domain within the structure, and must follow these syntax rules:

Length: Each label can theoretically be from 0 to 63 characters in length. In practice, a length of 1 to about 20 characters is most common, with a special exception for the label assigned to the root of the tree (see below).

Symbols: Letters, numbers are allowed, as well as the dash symbol (“-”). No other punctuation is permitted, including the underscore (“_”).

Case: Labels are not case-sensitive. This means that “Jabberwocky” and “jabberwocky” are both permissible domain name labels, but they are equivalent.

Uniqueness Requirement: Every label must be unique within its parent domain. 

ratty

FWIW Sonos has no interest in local device names, at least for the players themselves. That dependency was removed some time ago, on security grounds. 

I find the DHCP settings in some routers to be mildly infuriating, and have long used a separate device for DHCP (which permits editing entries, dual MACs per IP, etc). This also means that a router swap-out / reset / reflash doesn't require several dozens of mappings to be redefined each time. 

buzz

ratty, what are you using as the DHCP server?

ratty

ratty, what are you using as the DHCP server?

Tomato (or FreshTomato). They include dnsmasq. 

For reasons of history and convenience the DHCP server currently runs on an old Linksys WRT54 box. It’s very responsive. I did consider migrating the function into my Nighthawk R7000 after flashing it with FreshTomato, but opted to let sleeping dogs lie. The R7000’s FreshTomato may need reflash/reset at some point and I just didn’t fancy having to re-enter some ~60 MAC/IP pairs.

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