Hi Jesus and dnsmasq-discuss, > ... the AP change the client mac-address with a combination of the three > last duplas from the own AP mac-addr and the last three ones from the client itself
I'd be very interested to know which IETF/RFC this behaviour is specified in before I embark on using mesh networking with dnsmasq myself. Do mesh devices _really_ do MAC-Address translation these days? If so, then how is a stand-alone DHCP server meant to know that it's talking to a device to which it has already allocated an IP address and which wants to keep using that address. If the MAC address gets translated then all devices' ARP tables would need updating too if they communicate with the device whose MAC address got translated. AFAIU the capability to specify multiple MAC addresses in the doc' snippet you quoted is to account for when a wired device is disconnected and then uses a different MAC address to re-connect via wifi. But in that case it _genuinely_ is a different device doing the (re-)connecting. It seems to me that this kind of MAC-Address Translation could be fraught with compatibility issues and that maybe the DHCP server integrated into TP-Link One-Mesh handles all these incompatibilities just fine. A stand-alone DHCP server maybe just can't for static IP address allocation! > If the client connects directly to the router, the dhcp request will come > from A:B:C:D:E:F. But if it connects to one of the AP, the dhcp request > will come from dN:eN:fN:D:E:F. Just to clarify the picture: physically the Ethernet frame containing the DHCP request/s will come via the link whose MAC is aN:bN:cN:dN:eN:fN (and dnsmasq will have no way of knowing this value), but --- in the absence of translation of course --- the DHCP request's frame's source MAC address (to which any DHCP offer etc messages will presumably be directed) is still A:B:C:D:E:F. So maybe try removing the facility that does the MAC translation or see if there are any other options to configure it, e.g. some kind of exclusion list. With MAC-address translation of this kind it seems to me that there either has to be a protocol to update other devices as to this change of MAC address or maybe you could consider using IPv6 which almost certainly handles this sort of thing better. As I'm just getting into using dnsmasq I find this a really interesting set of observations, but I acknowledge I probably didn't help you much. Kindness to all kinds Kristof [maiden contribution to the list] _______________________________________________ Dnsmasq-discuss mailing list Dnsmasq-discuss@lists.thekelleys.org.uk https://lists.thekelleys.org.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dnsmasq-discuss
