I have a GL-USB150 USB setup to tunnel into my home mesh access point which is connected to the internet and tunneled into the MESH through a remote node. That all works fine. But I'm having a DNS issue on the laptop.
Here's the scenario:
- I use a network separate from my own (i.e. Starbucks WiFi) to access the Internet through my laptop's own WiFi
- I plugin the USB stick and confirm it's operational and connected via tunnel to my home AP.
- NOTE: I can only access my home AP via its MESH LAN IP address, not by its host name.
- I can see all the other remote mesh nodes when I go to the mesh status page.
- When I click on the links to other mesh nodes, there's no DNS translation. My laptop's WiFi connection takes over the DNS translation, trying to push me out to the Internet which of course doesn't work.
- Knowing some of the IPs of certain devices on the mesh, I try pinging them and confirm that they work.
How can I trick my Mac into using the MESH DNS to translate everything on the 10.x.x.x network?
---mark
You might experiment with the WAN Wifi Client on the USB150. Disable your mac wifi interface and use your USB150 to connect directly to the Starbucks AP via WAN Wifi Client. The USB150 can tunnel to your home mesh network over that WAN, and your mac will have an IP on your USB150's LAN network from which it should be able to access the mesh network devices by hostname. Might work to accomplish what it sounds like you're trying to do.
To emulate a "Startbucks" connection, I setup the USB stick to use my external router's WiFi. I turned off the Laptop's internal wifi NIC. And what do ya know? It worked!
The only thing I could not do on my own WAN WiFi was create a guest network without a password. So it's not a true emulation of "Google Starbucks" which doesn't need a WiFi password. But I did test whether or not the USB stick would accept an SSID without a password. It works. My next test will be to go to an actual Starbucks and see if this works in the field. With so many publicly available WiFi access points around, this is a very valuable tool. I'd say every AREDN ham shoud have one of these in their Go Kit.
On my Windows PC, I have one NIC directly directly tied to my internal router which is a 192.168.1.x network, and which is connected to my external modem / router. Before I did the fix below, any call to a domain name on the MESH network (i.e. http://km6zpo-home-ap.local.mesh:8080/cgi-bin/status ) would be resolved using the NIC connected to the external router instead of going to the MESH.
In Windows 10 you must update the metric of each interface in the order you want.
https://www.macworld.com/article/3212987/how-to-set-network-connection-priority-on-a-mac.html
macOS does let you prioritize network connections, so you can pick which adapter gets used first when your system tries to connect to local network and internet-connected resources.
Would I use a "static route" to redirect all 10.x.x.x to my primary mesh node? And if so, what would the settings look like?
These the settings to fill in:
Name: (I assume can be anything)
Destination Network:
Mask:
Gateway:
Metric:
Interface (only one available: WAN)
To restate: I want all DNS calls that end with "local.mesh" to go to the MESH node.