Archer A7 DHCP lease request spam
So... I ordered the thing from Amazon and got it this morning. I've configured it to use AP mode, set up the SSIDs, and let it update it's firmware. It appears to work fine but... I just happened to notice that it's requesting it's DHCP lease literally every thirty seconds, no matter what lease options are sent back. That's kind of annoying and might be the sort of thing that would anger a large ISP since it results in a 200,000% increase in DHCP requests.
The environment it's running in is a pretty plain (although populated) home network, with a Slackware box running the essential infrastructure services with ISC's DHCPd and BIND. Default lease times are a max of a week, default time of 48 hours, minimum lease time 15 minutes. I have verified that things are as they should be using tcpdump. Also, before anyone attempts to suggest otherwise, there's over 100 leases defined, with 60 or so of them being for wireless devices. Exactly none of them behaves in any way other than what they should. The only even remotely unusual thing is that I'm sending back option 42 (NTP server address) in hopes that someday devices will eventually pay attention to that, but I'll probably eventually be patching dhclient for that myself.
So again... every thirty seconds is just spamming my logs, and absolutely not what the device should be doing (renewing once per day actually). I've emailed support and wonder if anyone else has noticed and possibly figured out a workaround.
Update: This appears to be tied to using AP mode. Rolling back to the previous firmwares didn't affect it in the slightest, but turn AP mode off and it appears to stop endlessly renewing the lease. That's not a terribly useful workaround.