I switched from Comcast to ATT Uverse a couple of months ago. That forces me to use a Uverse Residential Gateway (RG) (mine is a 2wire 3801HGV). Unfortunately, these are not really plug and play with a router like my (comcast) cable modem was - they are a (wireless) router in themselves (and a pretty crappy one). I want to continue to use some of the router features of my WRT1900AC router (e.g. guest network, set/same IP address/DHCP, etc.) - and I want to be able to swtich providers at any time (between comcast and att - to get the best price!) without changing / impacting my internal network - so I do not want bridge mode on the router.
So I set my WRT1900AC to be in the DMZ of the RG. This works well except for one issue (which from doing some searching is apparently a known issue) - every 10 minutes I lose internet connection (really - every ten minutes for ever and ever). This coincides with the DHCP lease time that is assigned to the WAN address of the router. Apparently, the issue is that the route tries to renew the lease before the time is up, but the response is filtered out by the routers firewall because the response if from a different IP. So at 10 minutes the connection is dropped and when reconnected - it gets a new lease. Now, believe it or not, most of the time I don't notice. The only time I notice is when working from home and using my Lync softphone(VoIP) or when I use RDP to connect to my computers from the outside - every 10 minutes a drop - regular browsing and even netfix are minimally impacted. If I was using an open source firmware (I am not opposed, but do not have the time right now to try), I believe I could put in a firewall rule to allow the dhcp response on port 68. I am currently trying out a double NAT situation - so my router WAN port is getting an internal address from the RG (and I am port forwarding on both the RG and router).
So I'd be curious of what other folks think on this:
1. How can I request an enhancement to Linksys for the out of box firmware to not block the DHCP response. I did try to open a support call - but no real luck there. Is there a place to suggest enhancements? To me it should just be an optional check box ("Allow redirected DHCP renewal")
2. I realize that double NAT may not be ideal in most cases, but are there really any issues with setting up this way? My double port forwarding is working so far - and haven't observed any performance or application impacts.
3. Anyone have any experience with static IPs and ATT uverse? A static IP would also fix my problem - but assume that costs more money then I am willing to spend. Or does anyone know how often the public address of the RG changes - how static is it? I could hardcode this IP in my linksys router - but would lose connectivity any time this public IP changed.
4. Is anyone using Open WRT to fix this particular issue (and adding a firewall rule like iptables -I INPUT -p udp --dport 68 -j ACCEPT)? If so, how much effort is it to load/configure Open WRT and how stable is it now?
Thanks,
Joey