I primarily run a mesh and am using my glinet as a second router.
I ran a lan cable from my mesh to wan port of glinet , then changed in settings to use wan as lan.
I need to have any devices running off the second device to be able to have a public IP address so from what I read I need to bridge the second router but I do NOT want to turn it into an access point because then it defeats the whole purpose of purchasing the glinet and being able to run firewall and nextdns rules.
If anyone can help I’d greatly appreciate it , been struggling for 2 weeks now.
I am not clear on your network setup and what you want to achieve.
This means that both Mesh and GL.iNet are connected LAN-to-LAN. There would not be any WAN on GL.iNet and it would not have Internet connectivity. All traffic may be able to go out through Mesh, but if Mesh and GL.iNet are on different subnets (e.g, 192.168.8.x, 192.168.10.x) and/or both have DHCP enabled, then that will cause problems.
It is not possible for LAN/WLAN devices to get public IP addresses, only private IP addresses assigned by the router’s DHCP. Given that Mesh and GL.iNet are connected LAN-to-LAN with no WAN connection, the GL.iNet would not have Internet connectivity and no traffic would go through it, hence, its firewall would not do anything.
Whenever LAN/WLAN devices are behind a router/gateway, they do not get public IP addresses. In general, residential ISP’s give only 1 public IP address (e.g., 142.251.32.78) for the modem/router that is usually provided/configured by the ISP. All devices behind that modem/router only get private IP addresses (e.g., 192.168.8.1, 192.168.8.2, …) and share the same public IP address of the modem/router through NAT. Even if you bridge the GL.iNet, LAN/WLAN devices would get private IP addresses from the Mesh router’s DHCP,.
Perhaps what you want is to connect the Mesh LAN to the GL.iNet WAN, but not set WAN as LAN.