Hi all

Having a dabble with starlink and found a quirk. If you power cycle the dishy, the 2862 gets a 192.168.100.100 dhcp IP on its WAN2 port. i think this is a temporary address while dishy is figuring out the world and rediscovering satellites etc. While its doing this you can go to the 192.168.100.1 page and get into direct off dishy's web interface. After a little while dishy reports its connected to the Internet once more. I think it switches to some sort of bridge mode at this point and you now get dhcp from whatever ground station you're connected to via starlink.

however... the 2862 sits there with initial dhcp info on wan2. something in how dishy and the starlink router (that i don't want to use) interact over dhcp triggers an dhcp refresh and internet works. the 2862 doesn't pick that up. it just sits and waits... forever?

there is no dhcp client renew/release options on the 2862 web gui, but jumping to the cli and doing a "ip dhcpc release 2" command achieves the needed magic. a few seconds later a new dhcp IP is on wan2 and the internet is there.

There seem to be a few posts on various other sites about starlink and odd dhcp. bodges with the starlink router between dishy and your own router, but with then an extra nat layer. or something with a hub/switch between. Another solution i've seem appears to be to just set your router with a default route via 192.168.100.1 and don't bother with the dhcp bit.

anyone else come across this?

The events you describe, sound very much like the way Cable Modems work - the DOCSIS negotiation takes a fair while, so you get a 192.168.100.x address first. However, this is handed out with a very short lease time, so the Vigor gets into line quite quickly, once the connection comes up.

Can you see the lease time for the 192.168.100.100 address on the 2862 :?:

I don't have a 2862, but I have briefly looked at Starlink. One of the things that put me off, was the fact that I'd have to upgrade my 2860 to match its potential speed ... yet they weren't actually making any guarantees at all re: speed. (and it's quite expensive :wink: - always a consideration for a Yorkshireman!).

The other problem is that the house roof is ' hipped ', which makes mounting the 'dish' a lot more problematic.

What sort of speeds do you get in practice :?:

thanks for the reply. i didn't make note of the lease times. i need to power cycle dishy again so I can actually grab the info. from memory I want to say Lease Time had a big number, say 34000ish. Lease Time T1 was something like '2'. All the other values were 0. I'd expect the elapsed values to be counting up, but sure they were '0'. the manual doesn't say what unit those numbers are in... seconds, minutes etc. I think i left it about 10 mins before intervening. Internet outages are unpopular in this house... i'll have to carefully time an outage!

out of the box, i had dishy plugged into starlinks own router for a while just to confirm it got an internet connection. All good, so plugged it into the 2862 and that worked straight away. next power cycle of dishy i got stuck on the temp IP. waited ages, reseated the ethernet cable, rebooted the 2862, dishy etc. no joy. plugged starlinks own router back in and then it worked. back to the 2862 and it was happy. thats what got me suspicious and at the CLI for this last try.

I agree on starlink being expensive. but my VDSL was pretty rubbish and got frustrated waiting for FTTP. its a month by month contract so can ditch it as soon as. Though the £480 kit and setup fee makes it more painful if its not needed for long. you can't sell the kit second hand... well not and whoever buys it have it work! so it'll either become an unusual sculpture, or someone else in the family can make use of, so long as they give me the £90 each month!

Speeds fluctuate a fair bit. In the week I've had it, 270mbit and fairly sustained for a 110GB download is its record. and that was on a day in the drizzle! different speed test sites give different results. its definitely better than my VDSL was in throughput terms. Latency while idle is about 35ms, vs VDSL at 25ms. odd packet loss is the main annoyance. Some games suffer with it. normal internet and video streaming is fine with it. IPv6 comes and goes, its not officially offered yet apparently.

mine is sat on the provided mount, chucked in the garden in what seems to be the standard new owner style. cable shoved in the window! think i've just worked out where i'll put it permanently. https://www.aerialsandtv.com/product/starlink-pole-install-kit-for-a-wall-6ft-straight-mast is probs what i'll use.

i think the wan2 port on the 2862 is officially rated for 300mbit, but goes faster depending what options you've got configured. too much firewall or data flow monitoring and it slows. most expect it to do 1g as its a 1g port. suspect your 2860 is probs the same?

jadzy wrote:
mine is sat on the provided mount, chucked in the garden in what seems to be the standard new owner style. cable shoved in the window! think i've just worked out where i'll put it permanently. https://www.aerialsandtv.com/product/starlink-pole-install-kit-for-a-wall-6ft-straight-mast is probs what i'll use.

I did a bit of observing of the long lines of Starlink satellites going over and came to the conclusion that any ground-based option would have to go in the front garden (the house is built into a hollowed out 'hillside' to the north). Being a conservation area, I'm sure someone would complain, but I could probably buy an old tractor and attach it to that - you can have any old junk lying around, if it's agricultural :wink:

i think the wan2 port on the 2862 is officially rated for 300mbit, but goes faster depending what options you've got configured. too much firewall or data flow monitoring and it slows. most expect it to do 1g as its a 1g port. suspect your 2860 is probs the same?

The 2860 coped with Virgin Media 200Mbps service (when I last had proper internet), but anything more would require the firewall turning off

Dishy is motorised so it can rotate and tilt. Only time its moved is when i first turned it on. Never seen it move since. Not even after a power cycle. Always seems pointed the same way whenever I look at it. Points pretty much up, with the dish maybe at 20 degrees off vertical and otherwise to towards the south. next time i do power cycle it (still not done it...) i might go turn it around a bit. see if it adjusts back to where it is now.

From what has been written, it sounds like the problem exists in the Starlink since it should issue a DHCP lease with a much shorter lease in the first instance, thereby enabling the router to renew thereafter.

The minimum lease time is just 1 second so it could easily use say 60 seconds, causing the router to renew every 30 seconds and hence re-IP once connection has been established.