More Fun with Brume 2 and Nest Wifi Pro

Technical Support for Routers
1

I had been running a TPLink router external to my Nest Wifi Pro router for vpn and a Pihole server for ad blocking. I was excited to get my Brume 2, thinking that it would consolidate those two items. With the drop-in gateway option I thought I'd get rid of the double-nat too. Then Google....

You can't turn off DHCP on the Nest Wifi Pro, so I set it to only give one one address, which was reserved for the Brume 2. I finished setting everything up, turned on Ad Guard, and it was all working fantastic, until it wasn't. Within a day, all of the Nest wifi nodes other than the router had dropped off the network. I tried a number of things, and even went as far as to factory reset the nodes and add them back. Again, they lasted about a day. I took the Brume 2 off the network and opened the DHCP range back up and they immediately came back online.

So, what I'm thinking is that the Nest nodes work until they call out to dhcp to renew, and then they get the Brume 2 gateway and Ad Guard DNS address, and that causes them to drop off. Well, no problem, I figured I'd just open up the DHCP on the Nest router for a few more addresses and reserve the IPs for the other Nest nodes. Well, Google actually hides the Nest nodes in the DHCP reservation screen, so that you can't...(##$#$#$!!!) To confirm, I even went as far as to take the whole network down except my main PC and the nodes, ping every address on the network, and bring up the arp cache. So I definitively know what the MAC and IPs are for the nodes. I just don't think I can do anything with that.

So, as far as I can tell, I either have to set the Brume 2 up outside the Nest, and go back to double-nat and additional port forwards, or I can leave it inside, and for the devices I can, manage all the network settings manually. Neither is ideal, but both are far less spendy than getting a completely new mesh setup from another vendor.

Any other ideas? Thanks!

2

Stuff like that is why I'll never use a Google networking product ever again (I did use the original Google Wifi mesh system for a bit). If you don't want to spend any more money, I'd just deal with the double-NAT. You should be able to set up DMZ on the Brume that points to your primary Nest Wifi Pro router and then just manage the port forwarding aspect of your network from the Nest.

1 Like
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Can you set the DHCP on the Nest WiFi Pro to only be enough for the Nest WiFi Pro nodes?

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Running two DHCP servers on a network is already a bit janky. If I were to open the DHCP range a bit for the nodes, without being able to reserve all of them, I wouldn't have any way of guaranteeing which devices got their addresses from which places. I'm trying to make my life easier... :smiley: