Having reread your original post, an issue to consider: make certain there are NO network loops. A device should not have more than 1 active network port unless it there is a specific requirement. I rarely see the need for this in residential networks and if I do, they are usually owned by people that can administer them. For example, if the Mac or PC had both the wifi card and an ethernet cable plugged in and active, issues can occur. It's a lot like having different but simultaneous conversations, one in each ear. You might get some of each conversation correct, but eventually overflow and saturation take over. Some people do this for bridging, etc. but it is most often an oversight. Most of the access points and routers have an option for "STP" spanning tree protocol, used to combat issues caused by physical loops. If you had 2 active IP addresses on the Mac, you probably had connections both wireless and wired.

Pronto and jcb, great advice, especially since it is setup the way you both described.
Pronto, the router has connected to it,
1. My switch
2. Alarm company remote communicator
3. My access point ..i mistakenly said earlier ap was connected to switch, but actually there is a cat6 from router to poe injector for ap which the cat6 from ap is connected to.

Jcb, i did have mac wired to switch, and later on the router but all the while had airport turned off. Also on windows laptop i disconnected from wireless and disabled wireless adapter.

Great. Can't tell you how many times when configuring a router or AP, I've accidentally hit the wifi switch on my laptop and caused myself unnecessary grief.

Pronto raises an interesting design point on wiring all things into a switch. An advantage to this design is that all intra-lan (switched) traffic stays on the switch with no burden on the router. The only traffic on the router is outside the lan (routed) traffic. You do have only 1 link to the router for that traffic and some would consider this a choke point. Not sure it matters if you have gig-gig connection from switch to router and a 10 or 15 meg internet connection.

Another design could be different from Pronto's in one way, AP's connected to the router and everything else to the switch. This assumes that most of the traffic on the AP is destined for the internet and therefore you have multiple paths into the router. Choke point is then the WAN (internet) connection. Big deal in enterprise networks, but I'm not certain of the impact in most homes.

I have worked with a lot of CCIE folks and it's my observation that design is a lot of art with solid engineering behind it. It's fun to see the different styles.

There's a large potential for loops with the number of devices with wifi built in. The frustrating part is with so many device types and manufacturers, you have no idea if default is wifi on or off.

Good luck on solving it.

Ok thanks.
My plan for tomorrow is to set static ip's for the nas and dvr and see if that helps.

@jcbremotes

Hi , i find the whole networking setup quite interesting, i used to do the same as you with AP's put them on the router, but having just done some networking courses, i can see why this is not such a good idea.

the first thing is that the SW generates a look up table for all the devices connected to the network.

As the Router is not just a Router, it is a Router and a Switch and sometimes a AP .the cost of the componets is done on the cheap.. so its better to put all the ethernet devices on a good switch where the routing table is stored.

lookforward to any comments you have :)

@gopronto,

I agree with your assessment. One of the most difficult challenges we face is the multitude of hardware vendors and their quality. Just on the WAN (internet) side we see such a variety - dsl, cable, uverse, fios, etc. Modems, routers, gateways. New versions (hardware and software) appears all to frequently, usually with some new set of issues.

If you look at sites like smallnetbuilder and dd-wrt, you'll find a lot of the same components across brands. Seems like even if you find a good router, the next version might use different components and be a complete disaster. In the corporate environment, we typically did not have this issue. From one of the major players, the hardware was usually solid. Our issue was the release of buggy software crapping out a network overnight.

If you can find a reliable switch you can introduce at least some level of stability. By standardizing on an implementation architecture, it should help your troubleshooting and you might identify some trends.

Reading these threads, there are so many "weird" issues....Sonos doesn't work on "xyz" because they block multicast or TIVO android app doesn't support WAP roaming. I just read yesterday on Tivo's support site that some routers (possibly switches) don't support Bonjour discovery protocol used to scan and connect to the boxes.

I think we will be chasing this stuff a very long time.

Have a great one.

i think your right... here in NZ they are just rolling out Fibre to the door so i wonder how much fun that will be :)

@ Zohan

How did you get on with your issue?

Thanks for asking, just came on to update the post.

Went yesterday. First thing I look at is clients mac laptop with the error on the deja vu download. I then use my windows laptop to browse the network and look in the openshare and all his music is there!
The error from deja vu was 'could not find openshare', but i guess all songs loaded before the error. So anyway, im thinking ip address problems and everything we discussed earlier. I get into router and change dvr and nas to static ip's.
Do some other stuff and then try to get into router and its locked up, only way to get back in is to reboot, so i do.
I forget exactly what i was doing next but couldnt access some ip addresses so i rebooted again.
Everything stable for a while as I am doing other things.
I then leave basement and up one floor notice one of the sonos play 5 units is missing from the device list, but weird thing is it is playing. Try to add it back to system and a couple other things and nothing works. Call sonos TS go through a few things and rebooted router 2 more times. He tells me usually it only takes 1 reboot but it took 2 this time tix fix the issue. This is in my head as also an ip address issue and im still not sure if this is all tied together but im pretty sure it is at that point.
Anyway, got everything working and stable and it's been ok since. I am thinking the netgear router might be a little lightweight for this system, and told the client so. If any problem arises he understands we will be upgrading.
So, everything looks ok to this point, and thanks to you guys for all the advice with this. I looked at that ccna course and will def. go for it when I can....

Thx!

Assign as many devices as you can statically (outside of your DHCP range.) If you are unable to set the ip's statically from the device then reserve the devices in the router. Just remember; if you do reservations and your client inadvertantly resets the router; your router will use dhcp to give your devices an ip address and nothing will likely communicate.

Your IP table shows alot of devices operating within the DHCP range so traffic jams are more than likely.

What i did was reserve the devices in the router (the dvr and nas) although the dvr i also set in its menu to be static.
The dvr is 192.168.1.4 and the nas is 192.168.1.20 , i didnt realize i should have set outside of dhcp range, where were you a couple days ago. :)

So i guess question now is if something doesnt work right do i go back and set them out of dhcp range, and you say i should set all devices, ....the access point , and all the sonos devices (7)...?
I also have 4 nest thermostats on the system connected wireless, set them static also?
Also, would a better router handle this better?

I just want to clarify, if the customer should reset to factory defaults the dhcp reservations will be lost. Just a normal reset/reboot of the router does not affect the reservations. Static addresses are always outside the DHCP range to avoid address conflicts (short discussion earlier in this thread).

A couple of observations and things for you to consider in choosing reservation vs. static. Each router manufacturer has different defaults for their LAN setup. They use different dhcp pool ranges, some have different IP addresses for the router itself (Linksys, Dlink, 2Wire, etc.) My experience has been routers are the most often replaced piece in a customer network followed closely by the ISP modem. If you set everything static and the customer replaces the router with a router with a different LAN setup you could end up with a crippled network. For example, if your customer replaces this netgear router with a Dlink, it's likely the Dlink router will be 192.168.0.1 with DHCP pool in that same address space. All of your statically assigned devices will be on a different subnet 192.168.1.xxx with a gateway (internet) of 192.168.1.1(the current Netgear).

If you use DHCP reservation and the same scenario happens, all the devices will simply grab new IP addresses from the Dlink. Things will likely work and you could implement reservation on the new router. You might have the same issues you have now since the control and other apps would now have to find the servers with their new IP addresses. The customer will have internet access.

Just some things to consider.

I have found some AVR's to have some intermittent issues with static assignment. I've had AVR's airplay and DLNA misbehave. For me, the issues disappeared when I changed to DHCP reservation. I have not yet found a pattern in this. To me it's counter-intuitive. Some devices are just a PITA to enter the IP address for a static, so again I would use reservation for them.

The usual practice in large networks is to assign static or reserved for "servers" and shared devices such as printers, and dhcp for most everything else. Since the Nest thermostats can be remotely accessed, I would check their website for suggested settings. Sonos uses apps for control so you might check their site as well. It really is dependent on the app.

The current router is an older router. Some quick research didn't give it particularly rave nor bad reviews. You might want to check some of the reviews on smallnetbuilder.
[Link: smallnetbuilder.com]

As long as you get a router with a good CPU and decent memory, I don't think the DHCP table is all that large.

Hope this helps.

Yes it helps. Any information helps. I know enough to get myself in trouble, with networking/routers.
This client will never replace a router, he will have me do it.
I thought reservation and static were different words for the same thing, but reading your post I guess that's not the case. So, reservation is what you do in the router and static is what you set on the device? Or is it reservation is set in router in dhcp range and static is set in router outside of dhcp range?
I need to advance my knowledge in this area, will definitely get some education.
Thanks for the info / help.

Reservation is dhcp address reservation and done in the dhcp server - in this case the router. It will always assign the same address to a specific mac address from it's pool. The device (ie laptop) is set to dhcp or "automatically request an ip address ".

Static addressing is set in the device (ie music server,control system) and should be outside the dhcp server address pool to avoid addressing conflicts. The router will not receive a request for an ip address from the device.

Best practice is to set devices static outside the dhcp range if the device allows you to do so. If you can't then reserve the ip address in the router within the dhcp range.