Vera 2 network setup problem, doesn't work correctly with getting IP via DHCP

Community Playground Getting Started & Initial Setup
1

I have just started setting up my vera 2 and have been having a hell of a time with the network setup.
I want the vera to act as a switch, and I want it to use DCHP to get its IP address. But it’s not working out well and I’ve got the following problems:

  1. There appears to be no way to do a DCHP release on the vera, this is a problem because of the other issues. Or if there is a way Level 1 support doesn’t know how, and they are the only ones in the office this week.

  2. The Vera has 2 MACs, this makes sense, one for wireless the other for wired. The problem is that either my network DHCP server isn’t working correctly or Vera is doing something wrong with the way its allocating IPs.
    My DHCP server is configured for static dynamic addressing, and I’ve allocated two addresses for the two macs on the vera.
    Say my mac are XX:XX:XX:XX:3A is allocated YY.YY.YY.24 and XX:XX:XX:XX:3B has X.X.X25 reserved. When 3A requests a IP it gets .24 and :3B gets .25.

When I look at under vera’s advanced settings for the network it shows both the WAN and LAN share the same MAC. The lan is listed as using the default IP, and was using the upper DHCP IP. This doesn’t make sense to me because I’m connecting to the vera with cat-5 and using the upper IP address. I do have wifi enabled on the vera, so that may make some difference. I don’t use wifi in the house, but was thinking of leaving in enabled on the vera just in case I wanted easy access to wifi at some point.

Accessing the vera with the default IP address doesn’t work, which isn’t what the network settings state. In fact the IP address used to connected wired is the HI IP, the one allocated for the WAN adapter.

So, I have no clue what is really going on. I can’t trust what the vera is telling me, because it isn’t consistant and it conflicts with what my DCHP server is telling me.

2

When operating Vera2 as a switch, it appears to do the DHCP request from the lower MAC (i.e. the printed WAN MAC on the sticker ‘minus 1’).

If you set up a static lease in your router against that MAC, Vera should be getting the designated IP. (And will show that MAC for the [tt]wan[/tt] and the designated IP, plus the same MAC for the [tt]lan[/tt] and the default 192.168.81.1 in the advanced WiFi settings.)

3

What you’re seeing is typical OpenWrt bridged interface behavior. It seems that both the Ethernet ports have the same MAC address (so they are really two ports of a three-port switch, with the third port connected internally to the CPU). The Wifi radio has a different MAC address as you know.

Operating a bridge between the Wifi and the Ethernet switch involves Vera running the brctl command, which you can run if you SSH into a shell (brctl show). Bridging makes a new interface out of the other interfaces (eth0.0, eth0.1, wl0) and calls it br-lan. Since this is a virtual interface OpenWrt picks a MAC address to assign to it. It looks like this is chosen from one of the component physical interfaces, hence why you are getting a DHCP request with what looks like the Wifi MAC on the Ethernet wire. Really it’s the bridged br-lan virtual interface that is doing the DHCP request.

There may be a way to make Vera do a DHCP release but I bet it’s only available on the command line. Since this is a purely OpenWrt matter you may find your answer on their forums.