can please anyone, advice me what is wrong with my hotspot and dhcp server setting, because it’s a bit confusing when i would like to trace an user who use the hotspot based on their ip address.
the lease that the dhcp gave to the client is totally different with the one guest used on hotspot.
as attached below for the example :
It sounds like the Hotspot is ‘masquerading’ your real IP address to something else.
Go to IP/Hotspot/Hosts. There you should see a list of all MAC addresses, the IP address the client has, and the IP address that Hotspot is using to connect them online.
Your pool is too small and/or the lease time is short with a long hotspot idle timeout.
Basically, the Hotspot will assign a virtual IP (the “To Address” IP) for every host that is present on the hotspot network. This is because the Hotspot can work around clients that cannot change their IP settings - suppose a host with a static IP joins the hotspot… the Hotspot will assign a To Address from the actual hotspot IP range, and then deal with the host using that To Address, and not the real address on the host itself.
If a host is assigned an IP by DHCP, but the hotspot still thinks some previous host has that “To Address” - then the hotspot will choose some unused IP from the hotspot range, and assign THAT to the host - even though the host’s actual dhcp-assigned address is actually usable.
This symptom of mismatched IP/To IP addresses happens whenever the pool gets crowded. You can reduce it by using a larger IP range (e.g. a /22 supernet instead of a /24) and/or shortening the idle/keepalive timeouts on the hotspot profiles.
I don’t think that it has something to do with the address pool. I am trying to figure this out with only one client.
And please also note that on the “Leases” tab of DHCP server, the active IP address is the same with the Address on the Hotspot server.
Go to IP/HotSpot/Servers and change Address Pool=None. You will no longer see the issue, but devices with Static IP addresses will not be able to connect.
I bet if you’d looked through the hotspot hosts list, you’d find an idle entry for a host with address=10.5.50.254 and to-address=something else
Basically, the DHCP server considered 10.5.50.254 to be available, but the hotspot didn’t, so the hotspot had to pick a different IP address to pretend is your computer.
If you’d tried to ping your computer from the Mikrotik, you would have to have used 10.5.50.210 (the to-address).
Hi, I know this is an old post but it seems there was not a solution, I am experiencing the same issue with static ips out of the ip range of my hotspot, How can I do to delete invalid Ips in order to accept only hosts that received an ip address from dhcp?