Two routers internet working on Windows, doesn't work on Mac

dannyritiu

Prominent
Aug 30, 2017
2
0
510
Hello,

I have a strange setup, the only one that worked for me until now on my Windows.

I have router1 TP-Link WR940N. It's WAN is connected to the modem and the WAN IP is 172.17.... something. This modem has LAN IP 192.168.0.39 and has DHCP disabled. The router is connected to a switch where a big internal LAN with fixed IPs from 192.168.0.1 to 192.168.0.99 are connected (it's an industrial machine network).

I have router2 TP-Link WR902AC. It only has one Ethernet port and this router is configured as Access Point. It has LAN IP 192.168.0.19 and has DHCP enabled. DHCP will lease addresses from 192.168.0.100 to 192.168.0.199. Furthermore this router's default gateway is router 1 (192.168.0.39)

The reason why I have this setup is that I want to connect my laptops and phones to the wired network using Wireless (for this I am using router2 as access point), but at the same time I want to access the internet (which sadly comes on a different subnet so I must use router1 for this).

The problem is that everything works under Windows (I tried both Windows 7 and 8). Furthermore on my Android/iPhone phones I can send/receive messages using WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger) but when I try to access the internet from Chrome on my phone, it just won't work. So neither from my phone, neither from a Mac, I can't access a normal webpage. I even tried to enter the IP address of Google to Chrome (172.217.21.100) because I thought it might be a problem with DNS Server, but it wouldn't work. Neither from my Android Phone, neither from iPhone, neither from Macbook.

All the devices that are connected have correct IPs (in the range 192.168.0.100 - 192.168.0.199) and everywhere the Gateway is router1 192.168.0.39, everywhere DHCP is router2 192.168.0.19 and DNS Server is router1 192.168.0.19.

In my opinion everything is correct and I don't understand why on Windows it works perfectly and on other devices not.

What can be the issue?
 
Solution
Glad you found your problem.
Yes, your AP needs to know where to get DNS from to go outside of your network to the internet.

I would suggest on router 1 to manually set entries for DNS on it.
Under standard configuration it is going to use the DNS server of your ISP which is usually slower and less reliable then google dns, or open dns or whatever other 3rd party DNS you may want to use. For Google DNS the primary is 8.8.8.8 and secondary is 8.8.4.4

At least when my internet was ran by Time Warner, I would have times where a page would not load due to DNS issues, changed my router to use google's DNS and no problems since then.

dannyritiu

Prominent
Aug 30, 2017
2
0
510
Never mind guys, turns out that on the router2 the DNS Server was set to 0.0.0.0, somehow when I've set it to 192.168.0.39 everything started to work on all devices. I will leave this solution here because maybe it will help somebody in the future.
 
Glad you found your problem.
Yes, your AP needs to know where to get DNS from to go outside of your network to the internet.

I would suggest on router 1 to manually set entries for DNS on it.
Under standard configuration it is going to use the DNS server of your ISP which is usually slower and less reliable then google dns, or open dns or whatever other 3rd party DNS you may want to use. For Google DNS the primary is 8.8.8.8 and secondary is 8.8.4.4

At least when my internet was ran by Time Warner, I would have times where a page would not load due to DNS issues, changed my router to use google's DNS and no problems since then.
 
Solution