Can only connect to guest network

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Can only connect to guest network

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Can only connect to guest network
Can only connect to guest network
2022-04-25 00:49:42
Model: Deco M3  
Hardware Version:
Firmware Version:

My network had been working fine for over a year, but over the past month or so my devices started intermittently not being able to connect. Updating the firmware did not help. Finally, today, I found that I'm no longer able to connect any device at all. On my phone it says IP configuration failure. I tried some troubleshooting steps I found from Googling, such as restarting the Deco, modem, phone, and forgetting the network, but no luck. If it matters, I've always only used the 2.4 GHz band as my smart devices only work with that.

 

Fortunately, all my devices can connect to the guest network. 

 

Any ideas on how to fix this problem?

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Re:Can only connect to guest network
2022-04-25 02:09:00

  @sturmliouville 

Hi, welcome to the community.

Are all your wireless devices still unable to connect to the main network now?

When it happened, would it help if changing the SSID of the main network on the Deco APP?

How often would this issue repeat?

Have you tried to factory reset the Deco M4 and start the setup from scratch before? 

By the way, may I know how many smart devices you have?

Thank you.

Best regards.

 

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#2
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Re:Can only connect to guest network
2022-04-25 16:10:44 - last edited 2022-04-25 16:14:55

Most probably you have your devices with mac random address enabled on your main wifi connection settings, this means that when they connect to the deco they are seen as a new device, and a new IP is given eating, slowly, all the dhcp pool available. The guest network seems to not save anything, and thus the IP pool is not eaten. Check your offline devices, delete them from the Deco app and go thru all your home devices and disable the mac address randomization for your main network. And only allow your "home" devices connect to the main network, everybody else (visits, other non-resident family, should only be allowed to connect to the guest).
I had a couple of android mobiles here that had a nasty android 11 bug that would cause any wifi to always use random mac addresses, before getting rid of them, I had to manually, one each month, to go to the disconnected devices and delete the older ones to avoid them eating that IP pool. And by then I asked here that tp-link they should add an expiration to the IP pool reservation list, that we could select (like forget devices that did not connect in the past week or month for example), thus freeing back these IPs to the pool.
 

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#3
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Re:Can only connect to guest network
2022-04-26 02:18:27

Thanks guys. For some reason, resetting the Deco didn't work, but changing the SSID did. I don't know if the randomized MAC setting was the culprit, but I disabled that feature on my phone. The rest of my devices unfortunately don't have such an option available, nor do I know if they use a fixed MAC address. 

 

I did not find changing the SSID as a solution during my Googling, so hopefully this thread will prove helpful to someone in the future.

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