SOLAR INVERTER NETWORK

[Sqwalo]

Hi everyone,
I connected the solar inverter to a wireless range extender (I named SSID SOLAR) since it's located far away from the router - and I managed to access it from the wireless extender LAN. However I have 2 (probably related) problems....
1) I cannot access the inverter from the home LAN - I have to connect to the extender's SOLAR network directly to access it and
2) I cannot connect to the inverter from external networks..... The Solar network is connected to the internet through an Ethernet cable between one the extenders and the router, whilst the inverter is connected to another extender via another Ethernet cable. So the only way to access the inverter data is by connecting directly to the network extender's network - any suggestions please?
Thanks in advance.

[deanwebb]

It sounds like the SSID SOLAR is not routed to the rest of the network - If that's the case, what's the device that is handling the connections between the SSID SOLAR and the other networks?

[Dieselboy]

In addition and separately to Deans post, I can guess that you've connected the WAN port of the new wireless router/extender to the existing network and extended the network this way. By doing it this way, you have 2 "routers" to manage. A router, is a device which handles communications between two different networks. In your case you have a firewall enabled there also (if it's a regular off-the-shelf wireless router.


An alternative, and what I would do if I only had this equipment to use, would be to NOT connect the new router by the WAN port to the existing network but instead, CONNECT the new router using one of the (usually 4) grouped together switch ports. Basically, switch on router 1 to switch on router 2 (instead of WAN port on router 2).

The ports I am talking about usually look like this: [ ]:::[ ][ ][ ][ ]         
You can see that there are 4 ports grouped together. This is usually the "switch" and the one by itself is the WAN port in most cases.

I'd suggest that you should change the SSID (as well as encryption and encryption key) to be the same as the original network but make sure to use a different channel number so they dont conflict.

With this setup, the solar system should connect to the strongest signal, and get onto the inside network where you are with a computer and can access it. I think this is how you had it running before adding the additional wifi signal.

Though, some people dont like this "design" and would rather have your current design for security  and segmentation reasons. To make it work how you have it now, you need to add routes.
The first one will be to tell router 1 that network 2 is via router 2. For example, in router 1 config page you say that the network behind router 2 is reached via router 2's IP address of the wan port. You'll need to edit this if router 2 WAN IP changes so ideally you would hard set an IP address so it does not change if stuff reboots for any reason.

The other route that would be required is to tell router 2 how to get to router 1 network. However, usually this is already covered by a) the default route (default gateway) which router 2 would receive automatically if it received an automatic IP address and b) the fact that the router 2 has an interface (wan port) into the router 1 network, it has a "locally connected network" and should know how to get there.