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@bambina Let’s set up your first router then. What problems are you encountering with the single router? You don’t have to travel to the tenant’s place to do this.

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3. You can connect two pcWRT routers by wire or by wireless. What I’m suggesting here is a three router setup: 1 router + 1 AP connected by wire + 1 wireless satellite node. They’ll all be in the same subnet – so no NATting. IPv6 is not enabled by default. Check out this video for wireless mesh setup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lIyd4BCsEQ

4. If you have multiple devices streaming or gaming, 150Mbps is not a lot of bandwidth. If that’s the case, the only solution is to get more bandwidth from your ISP. But you can use bandwidth monitoring on the pcWRT to find out the bandwidth consumption for each device.

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One pcWRT will function as a router (let’s call it PCWRT1), the other as AP (let’s call it PCWRT2). You’ll connect like this:

1. Connect the WAN port on the PCWRT1 to a LAN port on your ISP router.
2. Connect a LAN port on PCWRT1 to a LAN port on PCWRT2. Preferably, tag the connected port on both sides. If you don’t tag the ports, only LAN will be served from PCWRT2.
3. Switch PCWRT2 to AP mode

To answer your questions:

1. Yes, you can keep SSID broadcast on the ISP router. But devices connected to the ISP router won’t be visible from the pcWRT interface, and can’t be controlled by the pcWRT router.
2. You can access the router remotely regardless of VLAN configurations. I’m not sure how your safety devices are connected, but in general your safety devices should continue to work regardless of remote management or VLANs.
3. You can set up another PCWRT by wireless mesh networking.
4. How many devices are we talking about here? What’s the ISP speed and expected bandwidth consumption?

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@bambina Yes can set up the routers before you go to the tenants place.

However, you can’t connect pcWRT’s LAN1 to ISP router’s LAN1. You need to connect pcWRT’s WAN to ISP router’s LAN, so that they are on different subnets. And then turn off WiFi on the ISP router – your devices will be confused if both WiFis are broadcasting with the same SSID. For more range, you can set up another pcWRT router as an access point, like described here: https://portal.pcwrt.com/blog/2024/12/07/how-to-set-up-a-second-pcwrt-router-as-an-access-point-with-vlan-support/.

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@w9yu34ac8yd2 Can you send a copy of your backup file just before the change causing the crash-reboot loop to [email protected]?

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@bambina Sorry for the late reply.

You can try to replace the ISP router with the pcWRT, assuming there’s an Ethernet connection from the modem. Most of the time, it’ll just work. But some ISPs have special protocols between their router and their services. In that case, the pcWRT router won’t get an IP address from the modem. You can log in the pcWRT to check. In that case, the Status page will show Internet “down”.

But connecting the pcWRT WAN to a LAN port on the ISP router should always work. Again, log in the pcWRT and check the Status page. If you connect this way, turn off WiFi on the ISP router.

With a wired connection, you can connect a second pcWRT router as an Access Point to the main pcWRT router. Checkout this guide: https://portal.pcwrt.com/blog/2024/12/07/how-to-set-up-a-second-pcwrt-router-as-an-access-point-with-vlan-support/.

When a wired connection is not possible, you can add a second pcWRT router as a mesh satellite. Checkout this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lIyd4BCsEQ

You can do both if needed.

The easiest way to set up remote control of the pcWRT is opening it up for cloud management: https://portal.pcwrt.com/forums/topic/how-to-remote-control-the-pcwrt-router/. The pcWRT router remote control is more secure because it does not require an open port on the router. You can test remote control on location with your phone by turning off WiFi on the phone.

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@galaxysurfer To recap, sometimes the router fails to obtain an IP address from a cable modem. Here are some ways our users have tried and worked:

• Power down both modem and router, then power up the modem first, connect and power up the router. Some users reported this working after a couple of tried.
• Clone the MAC address off of a device you know that works into the “override MAC address” box on the Internet Settings page.
• Make sure that the router’s time is correct. If needed, you can sync the router time with your browser on the System Settings page.
• Call your ISP tech support to troubleshoot. They should be able to see a new device connecting to their service when you connect the router.

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All DNS traffic will be sent to the main node. The satellite node also sends DNS to the main node.

To use your pi-hole, you need to change the DNS on the main node. If you enabled Access Control, then the DNS settings specified in the profiles is used. Unless DNS is set to “System Default”, then system level DNS is used (i.e., DNS under the Internet Settings page).

If Access Control is not enabled, the DNS defined in the Internet Settings page is used. By default, it’s your ISP DNS servers. You can override that by checking the “Use custom DNS servers” box and entering your own IP addresses.

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Sorry, change password was broken in v2.8.7. This is fixed in v2.8.8, just released.

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Do not tag any port connected to a computer. Tag a port only when it’s connected to another router’s tagged port.

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Band steering won’t solve this problem. In fact, it may even confuse the 2.4GHz IoT devices more.

If you can’t set up the devices with the same SSID on both bands, it might be that your smartphone is connected to the 5GHz band but your IoT devices can only connect to the 2.4GHz band. You may use different SSIDs for 5GHz and 2.4GHz to solve this problem. Or, you may start with two different SSIDs to do the setup, then change the 5GHz SSID to be the same as the 2.4GHz one after you set up the IoT devices.

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@rglass Please send email to [email protected]

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Connections to those IP addresses failed with reason “Failed”, not because the router blocked those IP addresses but because those IP/ports were not available. If the router blocked those IP addresses, the reason would be “Blocked”, “VPN/Proxy”, “P2P”, etc.

Also, DNS look up for tracker.justseed.it failed not because the router blocked the lookup. This URL reports the same results: https://www.nslookup.io/domains/tracker.justseed.it/dns-records/.

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@casino Thanks for the feedback. We’ll see if we can accommodate this.

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Most IoT devices are controlled over the cloud. The controller app on your iPhone has the abilities to view and command the devices wherever it has Internet access (either at home or outside). Both your controller app and the IoT devices talk to some server provided by the IoT device vendor. The router only provides Internet access to these devices. Responsiveness depends on the vendor’s cloud service. The only time a router would hinder performance of these devices is when it blocks access to the vendor’s server.

1. You can find more info here: https://portal.pcwrt.com/blog/2020/01/08/how-to-allow-or-block-web-sites-on-the-router/
2. When you choose an ad-block list, all profiles will use the same list. I.e., you can’t have different block lists for different profiles. However, you can enable ad-blocking for some profiles but disable it for other profiles.

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