Time Capsule Requesting Extra IP Address

[jwzimm]

Hey all,

I recently picked up a 4th gen airport extreme with the 2Tb time capsule. My intention was to add this to my existing network as a Time Machine backup location as well as to extend my wired network a bit. My main router is a Netgear Nighthawk D7000 and has been flawless since I got it several years ago.

Basically, I am using the Time Capsule as a glorified switch to add two extra gigabit ethernet ports to my wired network as well as give me a networked data drive.

My issue is that the Time Capsule seems to not be playing nice on the network. I have set it up with the wireless switched off and the network in Bridged mode. I have the WAN port plugged into one of the LAN ports on the Nighthawk and have three other network devices plugged into the LAN ports of the Time Capsule. One of those devices is my Accurite Wireless receiver for my weather station. Since the reconfigure I have been getting notifications from Accurite that they are losing the connection to the receiver for two hours or more occasionally. In order to troubleshoot this I took a look at the information in the Nighthawk management menus and found a couple strange issues.

1. The Time Capsule has requested (and been assigned) two different IP addresses.

2. In the event logs I am seeing that the Time Capsule is requesting an IP address about once per minute which seems very excessive.

I tried to get the Time Capsule to calm down by reserving a specific IP address for it in the Nighthawk as well as turning off DHCP in the Time Capsule and setting it to a static IP address to match. Much to my chagrin it still requested a second IP address and the network stability issues continued. The time capsule is reporting its IP address as the one I assigned it and there is no mention of the second phantom address.

Any ideas what the problem is? This seems like it should work just fine but I cannot abide the network instability it is causing.

p.s. I am not interested in hearing why I should just switch out the Nighthawk for the Airport.

 

[BrianBaughn]

Did you try the setup of a DHCP reservation on the Nighthawk for the TC and the TC to get an IP via DHCP?

 

[jwzimm]

Did you try the setup of a DHCP reservation on the Nighthawk for the TC and the TC to get an IP via DHCP?

I did that as well and the nighthawk still ended up assigning it two IP addresses. One was the reserved address but then the TC requested another one and the Nighthawk gave it a second one.

 

[BrianBaughn]

At this point I'd probably pare the setup down to just the Nighthawk, the TC and the necessary one computer (to see what's going on) and see if the problem still exists.

 

[jwzimm]

At this point I'd probably pare the setup down to just the Nighthawk, the TC and the necessary one computer (to see what's going on) and see if the problem still exists.

I think I may have linked the timing of the network drops to when my Apple TV goes to sleep. I wonder if the TC is trying to reserve an IP address for it for some strange reason.

In any case, I opted to adjust the network a bit. Here is what I have done.

I swapped the Apple TV and the Accurite station so now the Apple TV is hooked into one of the TC's LAN ports and the Accurite is hooked into a Nighthawk LAN port. I also went into the Nighthawk settings and reserved an IP address for the Accurite station. Hopefully that will prevent the TC from kicking it off the network.

 

[Phantom Gremlin]

I think I may have linked the timing of the network drops to when my Apple TV goes to sleep. I wonder if the TC is trying to reserve an IP address for it for some strange reason.

Yes, that's exactly what the TC is doing.

It's something that Apple does to save power. Certain Apple devices (such as access points) on a network can be "sleep proxy servers" and have a capability to process various packets on behalf of different devices that are in low power mode. Time Capsules can do this. It all happens without you needing to set anything up. Unfortunately for you, this "magic" seems to be causing you difficulties.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonjour_Sleep_Proxy

 

[jwzimm]

Yes, that's exactly what the TC is doing.

It's something that Apple does to save power. Certain Apple devices (such as access points) on a network can be "sleep proxy servers" and have a capability to process various packets on behalf of different devices that are in low power mode. Time Capsules can do this. It all happens without you needing to set anything up. Unfortunately for you, this "magic" seems to be causing you difficulties.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonjour_Sleep_Proxy

Yeah, most of the time I like that Apple "just works" but in this case, it bit me. I was able to get it resolved by reserving the IP address for the Accurite station so the TC would not "steal" it. Everything seems to be working good now.

For the future, is there any way to turn this feature off in the TC?