Unifi Dream Machine

philupnorth

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Hi everyone


First off I am not an IT guy although I am trying to learn the basics


I bought a Unifi dream machine because I am converting my home to a smart home & need more access points than a normal router can provide. I tried setting up the dream machine yesterday & for the most part I got it working fine & it has a much greater range than my old setup which was Netgear Orbi with an old talktalk router acting as an access point. Everything seemed to work fine except that I have a number of WD NAS drives which I could no longer access with the dream machine connected. After a lot of frustration I ended up going back to my old setup while I try to figure it all out.


I think I have found the problem which is that my Orbi has assigned the NAS drives with IP addresses of 10.0.0.6, 10.0.0.12 etc. I would prefer not to have to reset the NAS drives as I have had difficulty in the past getting them to show up so I can map them as I don’t have the knowledge to do it easily & at least this way I know I can access them with my old setup.


Can I createp a wired network for 10.0.0.1 to 10.0.0.100 just for the NAS drives on the dream machine? I have 5 WD NAS drives & they have IP addresses ranging from 10.0.0.6 to 10.0.0.30 but if I set the range to 100 I’m covered for things in the future & might just keep all hard wired devices in that range


When I setup the dream machine I created an identical wireless network for smart home (IoT) & all my smart home devices connected to it without me having to go through setting them all up again so assume it might work if I create a network for my NAS drives but could do with some advice if my theory is incorrect


I’m working later today so I won’t be able to follow the topic & thank people for their input until tomorrow



Thanks
 
If your NAS's were getting their IP addresses from your Orbi automatically using DHCP, then whatever you do, they are going to have to obtain new ones from the UDM - even if you ascribe them the same IP address. The DHCP "lease" that they obtain will be different, even if you give them the same IP addresses.

But basically, yes, you can pretty much design any addressing scheme you like.

I doubt you'll need the 24million IP address the "class A" private IP addresses (10.0.0.0 thru 10.255.255.255) avails, so I'd pull down the subnet mask and make it a bit smaller - 256 should be more than enough so a subnet of 10.0.0.0/24 or 10.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 depending on the method of defining subnet masks the UDM offers (both these notations are the same thing expressed in different terms.)

Then it should simply be a matter of ascribing the UDM's "LAN" interface an appropriate IP address and setting up a big enough DHCP Range for your needs.

If you want to pre-stage the UDM's DHCP Server so that it grants particular IP addresses to particular devices then that should be possible using DHCP "Reservations." Basically, DHCP ascribes IP addresses to MAC addresses and with decent kit you can set up DHCP Reservations in advance, but that means you'll need to go find the MAC addresses of your NAS's.

If you are lucky, your NAS's may ask to renew their "old" DHCP leases and the UDM may honour that and give them the same IP addresses they had before, but it's by no means guaranteed. Pre-allocating DHCP Reservations is pretty much bullet proof, but takes as bit more effort as you have to go find the MAC addresses.

When you make the changes, the network may fall to pieces for a bit as a lot of devices serviced through DHCP will have "old" leases with incorrect addressing until DHCP does it's magic and sorts it all out for you. If you leave it all alone, it'll typically resolve after 24 hours or so. You could expedite this a bit by rebooting all the clients one you have made the required changes on your UDM.

Pedant alert - but you old router could have facilitates as many Wi-Fi AP's as you like, there's no limit apart from the size of the IP address space, and most SOHO routers can handle at least 253 which should be enough for all but the biggest mansions! Routers sit at the "edge" of networks joining to other networks, not in the middle "bossing" it. /Pedant.

I would start out by (on paper) designing the IP address scheme you want, then "stand alone" with just the UDM and a machine to configure it, set up the addressing scheme on the UDM, then get it on the internet, then set up any IP reservations you need, then start physically hooking up everything else.
 
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Thank you I will try this, if I can't get t to work I will have to reset the drives
 
I'm not sure what you mean by "reset the drives."

The worst thing that could happen is they end up with invalid IP addresses and you shouldn't need to "reset" them to fix that. If you've let them acquire IP by using DHCP, then all you should need to do is give them enough of a "kick" to cause them to go get new ones. Usually power cycling them will do the trick if all else fails.
 
Whilst using your old network setup browse to the admin pages for your wd nas and ensure set to dhcp


Also in above a 4 second reset only resets the admin side - should not mess with your data
 
I'm not sure what you mean by "reset the drives."

The worst thing that could happen is they end up with invalid IP addresses and you shouldn't need to "reset" them to fix that. If you've let them acquire IP by using DHCP, then all you should need to do is give them enough of a "kick" to cause them to go get new ones. Usually power cycling them will do the trick if all else fails.
From what I understand resetting the drives (press the reset button for 5 seconds) will force the drive to ask for a new ip address instead of trying to connect to the one it has on the old router

I don't know if it might be worth connecting my orbi to the dream machine to act as a slave or access point would solve the problem. I've not had a chance to try it yet
 
From what I understand resetting the drives (press the reset button for 5 seconds) will force the drive to ask for a new ip address instead of trying to connect to the one it has on the old router

I don't know if it might be worth connecting my orbi to the dream machine to act as a slave or access point would solve the problem. I've not had a chance to try it yet

No it won't - it could even make it worse is you have multiple DHCP servers active, and/or start duplicating IP addresses - it could get a real mess.

Forcing your NAS's to acquire a new IP address would be worthwhile if you are confident that "reseting" them won't force them back to factory defaults and/or wipe the data. If you just leave them alone for long enough, typically 24 hours, they will acquire new addresses anyway. It's just that they may be different to the ones they had before unless you set up some appropriate reservations for them in the UDM so it gives them the same addresses they had before.
 

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