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Yesterday, before I moved into a new house, I had the following setup:

  • 1 x Shaw Cable modem (Motorola, blue)
  • 1 x D-Link Xtreme N Gigabit Router (DIR-655)
  • 1 x Sony PlayStation 3
  • 2 x Apple iMacs
  • 4 x Apple iPhones (2 x 3G and 2 x iPhone 4)
  • 1 x Apple iPad (Wi-Fi only)
  • 1 x Windows 7 laptop (Asus, not that it matters)
  • 1 x Samsung CLX-3170 Series printer

Until I moved house yesterday, all of these devices played very nicely together. The printer and the PlayStation were plugged directly into the router via CAT5e. All the other devices spoke to each other (as required) wirelessly. And the router handles all my DHCP with a MAC-based reservation list.

I'm using WPA2 security with an appropriately long passphrase.

We moved into a new house yesterday, and due to a reconfiguration of our workspace, there is now a wall between the router and the printer. So to avoid drilling holes everywhere, I got one of these:

  • 1 x D-Link PowerLine AV Starter Kit

Then the chaos started. Whereas before I was happily having my router assign 192.168.0.x addresses to each device, since the introduction of the PowerLine gadgets, the DHCP addresses I've been seeing on the client devices are in the 192.168.100.x range, but only on the Apple devices. It appears that the other devices (the laptop, the printer, the PS3) are all fine.

Now, what's strange is that any reserved addresses (e.g. the printer, one of the iMacs, the iPad, for instance) had to be deleted and recreated, based on MAC address, even if the MAC was in the list before. Once I plugged those in again, with new IPs in the 192.168.0.x range, they all started working fine.

As I've already devised a workaround for this problem, it's purely an academic question now: is it possible that the PowerLine goodies can mess with DHCP like that?

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    What is the model number. Most PLC devices act as simple bridges so they should not have a DHCP server built-in, or interfere with existing DHCP servers. Check the manual.
    – dbasnett
    Commented Sep 26, 2010 at 14:14
  • I did, dbasnett. Model is DHP-307AV. The D-Link software also doesn't mention anything like DHCP.
    – user3463
    Commented Sep 26, 2010 at 16:10
  • Normal powerline adapters like the ones mentioned are acting like a switch and not messing with DHCP nor IP.
    – Werner Henze
    Commented May 3, 2013 at 11:52

1 Answer 1

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As noted in the original question, once I reset the MAC reservations, it all worked again, so as there's been no further interest in this question, I'll accept this answer.

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