BT home hub DHCP problem

My BT home hub renews the lease on the DHCP server every 24 hours. When it does so it cause all sorts of problems with devices losing connectivity. There is no option to specify when this renewal happens, only how often it does so. I don’t want it happening in the working day as it does now.

Anyone had this problem or have any advice on dealing with it? I thought I’d start with the STW lot before trying BT 🙂

Its own address you mean, or the leases it gives out to devices?

How about manually assigning a static IP address from within your network range to devices you do not want to get a new address? I realize that is not possible with all devices….
Or, can you tie MAC addresses to certain IP addresses on the home hub? Im not familiar with BTs hardware functionality.

A 24 hour lease on clients is a little strange even for BT, on all of their other gear I’ve used it’s been a 7 day lease.

If you can’t change it then the static IP for the clients you don’t want checking will work fine, just remember it is assigned if you ever take the device on another network and it doesn’t work.

I had this problem, go into the settings and change the lease time to the longest you can.

Cougar – Member
Its own address you mean, or the leases it gives out to devices?

+1

BT provide an IP address to your router via DHCP and your router provides IP addresses for your devices via DHCP, which DHCP is causing the issue?

Home hubs are just odd.

Have extended my wireless to my office using a cat5 cable from the home hub to an old Netgear wirless router. I’ve tried with the routers own DHCP enabled or disabled and sometimes I just get limited connectivity. Other times it’s fine and actually faster than using the home hubs wifi.

21 days is the max a BT Home hub will do on the DHCP lease

Never had any issues with mine as it always give me back the same IP on all devices connected.

In fact i’d say its quite uncommon for it to be renewing the lease and distributing different IP’s to devices

Sorry all, got distracted. Thanks for the responses. I can extend the lease time and see how I go, but since I use this network daily I’m still eventually going to have the same issue, albeit not every day. It is the lease on the devices since the IP of the hub hasn’t changed (that I’ve noticed).

Bear in mind that whatever is happening all devices do all work again, but it’s the fact it’s happening at 4pm when I’m working and don’t really want or need the inconvenience of losing connectivity, even for 5 – 10 minutes.

If I do change the time between lease renewal I get this warning “After changing these settings you will need to renew the IP address of all devices connecting to your BT Home Hub. Please follow the instructions provided with your devices.”

They should always renew without causing problems so just extend the lease time and as they renew they will pick up the new lease.

DHCP is designed not to cause you outages by them changing as it will check with the device if it still wants the lease half way through its lease length and then extend it if need be so when the lease is a week you should never notice the issue if the devices are regularly connected.

DHCP is designed not to cause you outages

Any ideas what else it could be? I was working today and at pretty much the time the leases renew I had the following network issues

– Mac lost internet connectivity
– Remote Desktop connection from Mac to Windows 7 laptop lost connection
– Remote Desktop from Mac to work Terminal Server lost connection
– Apple TV lost connection to Mac media library (kids were trying to watch a movie)

It only lasts a few minutes and has happened before at this same time so whilst I’ve no proof it is related to the DHCP lease renewal, that’s where my money is. I actually resorted to restarting the Home Hub because the Apple TV was repeatedly connecting and then dropping the connection to the Mac. I thought at first it was an IP address clash with one of my other devices.

I would suggest it’s broken. Either that or you’ve got static addresses on your network inside your DHCP scope.

You can reserve IP addresses for given MAC addresses, but regardless of that DHCP should try and renew the same IP where possible (which for a home LAN should be ‘always’). Whether the IP changes or not though, that shouldn’t cause disconnections.

What’s making you think it’s to do with DHCP or IP conflicts at all, btw? I don’t know about the iWorld, but Windows will tell you when it finds duplicate IPs on a subnet.

Cheers Cougar. It’s the big coincidence that network oddities are occurring at the same time as the lease renewal that’s making me ask these kind of questions. However you have given me a good tip with the static address tip. I do have one device that I reserve an address for. I used to do that on my old router and within the DHCP scope. It worked fine so never thought it would cause issues on this new router. Maybe the old router renewed the leases less often so I never noticed the issue my setup was causing.

UPDATE – just checked the settings and several devices are set with reserved IP addresses.

… correctly? (-:

Have you got some devices with static IPs (configured on the devices themselves) which is conflicting?

Eg, your PC has a reserved address in DHCP of 192.168.0.2, and you’ve also got your PS3 statically configured as 192.168.0.2 rather than using DHCP?

All devices are (intentionally)set with reserved IP addresess but I’ve not individually configured any device with a static IP.

Sounds like it’s broke, then. Have you tried turning it off and back on again?

I’d suggest setting if there’s a firmware update for it; failing that, get BT to send you a new one.

I turn it off and on most days on the advice of the engineer who installed it.

Thanks for all the help. I’ll monitor if the problem stops now I’ve set the lease renewal to 21 days instead of 24 hours, but will log it with BT anyway.

My NAS was having all sorts of bother, Time Machine vanishing, losing shares, Three Home Signal box dropping its connection… It just went on. Then I found the “extended uPNP security*” check box, and un-checked it.
Been fine since…

*may not be the exact words, but you get the drift…