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DHCP with more than 256 clients?

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18 Aug 2013 20:26 #77459 by walski
DHCP with more than 256 clients? was created by walski
Hey folks,

I've a beginner question here: What is the normal way to achieve a setup where you do have around 300 to 400 clients but still want to use DHCP? My goal is to bring wifi/internet connection to a conference. So interconnection between those people is not the most important part of this network setup. Way more important is that all people can connect to the internet. We got a Vigor 3900 and will run 4 VDSL lines into that. So I want to have some sort of round robin load balancing for all connected clients over those 4 WAN ports without worrying much about anything else ;)

Can anyone give me some hints on how to get there?

Thank you so much!

Thorben

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21 Aug 2013 17:03 #77496 by uberseehandel
Replied by uberseehandel on topic Re: DHCP with more than 256 clients?
Checkout Classless subnetting (CIDR). By changing your subnet suffix you can increase the number of available addresses.

For example 192.168.0.0 usually has a suffix of /24. Which is also described as a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0 (if you write that mask out in binary the first 24 bits are all 1) It has 256 subnets and 255 -2 usable addresses.
CIDR address range 192.168.0.0 - 192.168.0.255

Classless subnetting ditches Class A, B and C subnets and gives us more granularity and control

192.168.0.0 with a suffix of /20 has a subnet mask of 255.255.240.0 (first 20 bits are all 1) It has 4096 subnets and 4096-2 addresses.
CIDR address range 192.168.0.0 - 192.168.15.255

192.168.0.0 with a suffix of /30 has a subnet mask of 255.255.255.252 (first 30 bits are all 1) It has 2 subnets and 2 addresses
CIDR address range 192.168.0.0 - 192.168.0.3

Note the beginning and ending addresses in a range have special uses and cannot be used for hosts (devices)

See this http://www.subnet-calculator.com/cidr.php

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21 Aug 2013 17:38 #77501 by walski
Replied by walski on topic Re: DHCP with more than 256 clients?
Thanks a lot! I will give that a try asap.

Do you have any suggestion for the load balancing over the 4 WANs? Is it wise to go by IP ranges (first 50 IPs wan0, next 50...)?

Cheers,

Thorben

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24 Aug 2013 19:38 #77521 by lectrician
Replied by lectrician on topic Re: DHCP with more than 256 clients?
Have a look at Pfsense. This can use wide subnets. We have some pub wifi setups using subnets 192.168.8.1 on a subnet of 255.255.248.0, which gives you 192.168.8.1 - 192.168.15.254. Plenty!

Pfsense runs on a PC on it's own unix OS, installed on a bootable HDD or USB drive. You can fit several network cards to the PC, using them as WANS and LANS - Probably for you just one lan, and several wans connected to Draytek 120 modems (or two NICS connected to two dual wan draytek routers).

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24 Aug 2013 19:42 #77522 by walski
Replied by walski on topic Re: DHCP with more than 256 clients?
So my plan is do get all this done with a Vigor 3900, 4 Vigor 2750 modems and some sort of router that then connects to 6 Unifi wifi APs. Does that sound sane? I hoped to be able to live without pfsense or any custom hardware.

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27 Aug 2013 09:25 #77537 by uberseehandel
Replied by uberseehandel on topic Re: DHCP with more than 256 clients?

walski wrote: So my plan is do get all this done with a Vigor 3900, 4 Vigor 2750 modems and some sort of router that then connects to 6 Unifi wifi APs. Does that sound sane? I hoped to be able to live without pfsense or any custom hardware.



To connect the 6 UniFi APs, you would be better off with a switch than a router. Draytek has some switches -

Power Over Ethernet Vigor P1080 8 x 10/100 BaseT UTP ports
Power Over Ethernet Vigor P2261 24 x 10/100/1000 BaseT UTP ports

The G2140 has 24 ports without PoE

These switches have quite a good feature set, including the ability to set up isolated PVLANs - so its easy to isolate guests from the rest of the network AND FROM EACH OTHER (this is becoming a privacy issue).

If you don't need VDSL, you could use the Vigor 120 ADSL modem in place of the 2750 modems

R+C

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