New Interweb Service (Tell me I haven't screwed up)

Help setting up WiFi
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K4SOW
Posts: 3
Joined: Wed Sep 29, 2021 10:03 pm

New Interweb Service (Tell me I haven't screwed up)

Post by K4SOW »

Have had a local telco internet service for years, you know the story, paying for 15 Mbs and getting 5... Oh well, along comes T-Mobile 5G coverage for less than I was having to pay for 5 so boom off I go to a new carrier!... Tickled pink until I try and switch the Pi Star over to the new IP series... It has been easy up until now. my old DSL router always gave me a 192.168.10.? address, usually 6, 7 or 8 but never any higher than 20 or so. I would just look into my router control panel and make a note of the PI-Star IP and log into it... Easy as PI? Right?...
Well now the new Gateway has a crappy interface and one can no longer see anything about what the router is doing, IP addresses wise anyway so can't connect to the PI-Star dongle...
Well it is sorta' fine for now, as the old DSL service is still active and I can switch to it to make any changes, but I am going to drop that 100 dollar a month service as soon as possible!
Tell me if I'm going the wrong way here. I could just connect a router with wireless capability up to one of the 2 - cat 5 ports on the new Gateway, set it to supply DHCP addresses in the old 192.168.10.? range then query it when ever I need the pi-star IP? or is there a MUCH simpler way to attack this?

BTW, the new address range is 192.168.12.? And can NOT be changed
AF6VN
Posts: 821
Joined: Fri Jul 20, 2018 1:15 am

Re: New Interweb Service (Tell me I haven't screwed up)

Post by AF6VN »

Telling us the make/model of the gateway would at least give us something to Google... So far the only thing I've found also assumes you are using a smart-phone app (to be downloaded) in order to manage the gateway device), or... https://www.t-mobile.com/support/device ... et-gateway

Similarly "Pi-Star dongle" doesn't mean anything to me... The closest I find a ZumSpot USB "stick" -- which I think means it is just the RF module and still needs a Raspberry-Pi running the Pi-Star software. What R-Pi model? Most are limited to the 2.4GHz WiFi band.

If the router/gateway provides local DNS resolution, AND the R-Pi is connected to it, you should be able to access it using either "pi-star.local" or "pi-star" (I'd changed the default host name on mine, so it is "pi-star-3b" for me. If you haven't configured the new gateway access point, then the R-Pi should be falling back on being a non-internet-connected access point of its own -- and if you disconnect your computer from the gateway, do a search for WiFi access points, you should find the pi-star host -- connect to it and set up the WiFi network with the SSID/WPA(2) password you configured on the Gateway. Disconnect computer from it (revert to gateway), and reboot the R-Pi. (Alternatively, you can use the WPA Supplicant file builder https://www.pistar.uk/wifi_builder.php to create the connection configuration file, which you then have to copy to the R-Pi uSD card boot partition -- then return to R-Pi and boot).

Of course, much of this presumes the gateway PERMITS LAN<>LAN connections -- It wouldn't surprise me if that T-Mobile thing only works for LAN<>WAN connections. After all, the documents mention using one SSID for "guest" connections -- but then has this mess about all bands using the same password! A proper router uses a different SSID/password for Guest connections, and limits such to LAN<>WAN, while the non-guest/regular connection has a different SSID/password and allows for LAN<>LAN traffic.

Or... a cheap/small HDMI monitor, USB keyboard (Pi-Star doesn't run X-Window to my knowledge, so no need for a mouse) might get you a console login.

--
AF6VN
Dennis L Bieber
dh3ybe
Posts: 84
Joined: Sun Aug 26, 2018 9:02 pm
Location: Germany

Re: New Interweb Service (Tell me I haven't screwed up)

Post by dh3ybe »

Hello,

Here in Germany I use a T-mobile or Telecom router. You can give the raspberry pi a manual wlan ip-address,which is lower than x.x.x.20.

But watch out, which is address the router has got and do not double ip addresses.

If you do it in that way, you now your IP address and the dhcp-Server does not change it addresses. At some routers you can increase this limit.

This does not help in the case you want so have a specific name for the raspberry pi.

Maybe this helps a little bit or I misunderstood the problem.

Best regards
Kai
dh3ybe
K5ZIA
Posts: 9
Joined: Wed Apr 18, 2018 6:30 pm

Re: New Interweb Service (Tell me I haven't screwed up)

Post by K5ZIA »

If you want to know the ip that has been leased, something like angry ip scanner (yes, that's the name, Google will find it) will list every ip and device name that is active, wired and wireless. If you have an Android phone, Fing will do the same provided your phone is also on your wifi.

I use both here, handy when managing multiple hotspots.
K4SOW
Posts: 3
Joined: Wed Sep 29, 2021 10:03 pm

Re: New Interweb Service (Tell me I haven't screwed up)

Post by K4SOW »

Yea!... Angry IP to the rescue!... Thanks fellows...
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