Wireless mesh router connected to green. How to I access clients from wired clients on green?

2

Hello and welcome to our community.

In the scenario you described, the PC and the printer are on different subnets. The PC is on the 192.168.6.0/24 subnet, and the printer is on the 192.168.5.0/24 subnet. The PC therefore would not broadcast an ARP request for the printer’s IP address. ARP is a Layer 2 protocol and works only within the same local network or subnet. When the PC determines that the destination IP address is not in its local subnet, it will send the packet to its default gateway for routing to the destination subnet. The default gateway in this case would be the IPFire Router.

Here’s what would generally happen:

  1. The PC would attempt to send a packet to the printer at 192.168.5.161.

  2. The PC would recognize that the printer’s IP address is not in its own subnet (192.168.6.0/24).

  3. The PC would then send the packet to its default gateway, which is presumably the IPFire Router, for further routing.

  4. The IPFire Router would need to know how to route traffic to the 192.168.5.0/24 subnet. If it doesn’t have a route for that subnet, the packet will be dropped.

  5. If the IPFire Router does know how to reach the 192.168.5.0/24 subnet (through a static route), it would forward the packet to the appropriate next hop, which would be the AP in this case.

  6. The AP would receive the packet and forward it to the printer at 192.168.5.161.

  7. The printer would send the response back through the same path in reverse.

For this to work, you would need to configure routing rules on the IPFire Router to know how to reach the 192.168.5.0/24 subnet. Additionally, the AP would need to be configured to allow traffic from the 192.168.6.0/24 subnet to the 192.168.5.0/24 subnet.

2 Likes