PSA–Setting Static IP Address with the ATT U-Verse (GigaPower) Router (Pace 5268AC)

I just wanted to put together a quick blog post on how to set a static IP with one of these things if you have happen to have one…and a block of static IP’s.  I haven’t seen a lot of documentation on how to do this – there are a few articles I’ve found on the ATT forums that do a decent job…but I figured I’d do my part to help anyone searching around on the internet trying to figure out how to allocate their block of IP’s (setting them in the GUI is the easy part…it’s getting the devices to grab the public IP’s and then ‘allocate’ them…in other words, set a DHCP reservation or sorts…to your device that you want to assign the static IP). 

I switched out from the NVG router that was not working well for me (random reboots, packet loss, etc…) today and just thought I’d document the procedure for setting up devices with static IP’s.  I had a nice tech show up and do some diagnostics on my equipment…but even he didn’t know how to setup the IP addresses.  I’ve even talked to several folks at ATT tier-2 support that weren’t much help.  So, hopefully this helps you if landed here.

So, basically here’s the device we’re working with:

20160215_141125

On the back you’ll see the Model Number:

20160215_141149

The new router uses 192.168.1.254 to login just like the NVG.  Once they do their testing it should work fine for basic connectivity – internet browsing, etc…

The GUI is a bit different than the NVG in terms of finding the spot to enter your static IP range and then configuring it by ‘allocating’ the IP.

If you go to the SETTINGS –> BROADBAND tab you’ll see the option to add a ‘supplementary network’.  That’s where you’ll enter the router address and mask that ATT provides.  In the NVG you needed to enter starting and ending IP’s – you don’t have to do that here.

image

After you save that configuration then go over to the SETTINGS –> LAN –> DHCP tab.  About half way down you’ll find this.  Here’s where it gets tricky…

image

In order to “allocate” the static IP then adapter has to pick it up via DHCP first.  You can’t set it statically on the adapter itself.  If you do, it won’t work.  You have to leave the NIC set for DHCP but it has to get an IP from the public range to for the allocation to work properly.  I tried letting it get one from the private pool and then  mapping it to a public IP but it balked at me and gave me some error.  So, maybe yours will do that – mine didn’t.

Anyway, the tricky part here is that you probably want to have as few devices connecting to your network as possible and certainly nothing else that’s going to pick up an IP via DHCP while you are attempting this.

So, here’s what I did.  In my case I was setting up a NIC in a Windows Server 2012 R2 VM that has RRAS installed and is the endpoint for my Azure S2S VPN.  So, I went into the NIC properties and disabled it (it was set to get its IP via DHCP).  I went over to the web GUI and switched the DHCP from private network to public routed network and then saved the configuration.  Once it was saved, I went back over the to the NIC properties in the VM and enabled the NIC.  It went to pick up a DHCP address and grabbed the first available public IP in my static range.

SUCCESS!

Now you have to ‘allocate’ it.

image

If you scroll through the list you’ll see your public IP connected device.  It will say connected DHCP and then you’ll probably want to disable the firewall.  You’ll leave the address assignment set to public but then you’ll pull the WAN IP Mapping drown down and select the IP address out of the range you have available.   Hit save at the bottom and then it will tell you if the configuration was saved successfully or not.  Hopefully it saved. Smile

image

At this point you should be able to go back to the NIC and refresh it – do a /release /renew or reboot the machine/VM or whatever and it should come back up every time with your static IP reservation.

If you go to SETTINGS –> LAN –> STATUS you can see a list of connected devices/IP’s/details.  My public IP shows up there and I can see some detail:

image

Anyway, good luck.  Hopefully someone else who runs into this will find this blog and get a little help from it.  It’s not rocket science of course – just weird how you have to set this stuff up.  The NVG wasn’t all that different in terms of having to change the router settings to supply DHCP from the public range and allocating, etc… but I think I like this setup a little better.

FWIW, this router is WAYYYYY better than the NVG.  It’s 802.11AC so the wireless speeds are superfast.  I have U-Verse GigaPower so I get around 900’ish Mbps up and down on wired connections and about 250Mbps up and down on devices that I can connect to the 5GHz radio.  This router also does ‘guest’ wireless access as well.  It basically has a ‘DMZ” network (172.x.x.x) that it sticks guests so that they can’t snoop your 192.x.x.x while they are on your wireless.  So, I like that.

Good luck!