TG582N help anyone...?

Some time ago my ISP supplied me with a TG582N modem/router. I fairly quickly found a problem with it - certain entries that I added to the DNS table would change so that the name I had defined was pointing at the wrong IP address. After some experimenting I think I worked out what was happening and I consider it a bug.

After some discussion with my ISP they basically said this behaviour was by design, and that the TG582N was not designed for a network like mine(?!?) and that this problem was beyond the scope of their technical support and they could not comment further. Very unhelpful.

I found a workaround which worked for quite a while but last week the router rebooted for some reason and the DNS table started to go wrong again, so I decided to look at the problem again.

Looking through the CLI guide (the only source of detailed information I've been able to find on the device) I became curious about the "hostmgr" command group when I saw the data it was collecting.

Long story short... I disabled hostmgr and my problem with the DNS entries going wrong seems to have gone away, but I don't know what the consequence of disabling this function is.

Does anyone know what hostmgr is or does or in particular what impact disabling it will have? Better still does anyone know a source of information describing the function and intention of the numerous commands the TG582N supports rather than just the syntax of the commands with little or no indication of what any of them actually do?

Many thanks,

- suds

The 582n displays a list of the devices connected to it. I would think that the hostmgr command was related to that.

One thing you can do is to download the ini file, edit it, and then upload it.

@Michael_Chare - Thanks for your reply. Yes, I've seen the list of devices the TG582N keeps, both through the web interface and the CLI - and I suspect you are correct. The "hostmgr list" command displays these devices and the sometimes *incorrect* associations the router makes between IP addresses and MAC addresses - this is what I think was screwing up the DNS entries.

If the *only* impact of disabling hostmgr is that the list of connected devices is no longer updated then I really don't care, I'm not sure what use it is anyway. The DHCP server still works as expected, the DNS server now actually *does* seem to work as expected. So if that's the only downside, I'm happy to leave hostmgr disabled. I was just hoping to get some confirmation of that.

Although I do know how to download, edit and upload the ini file, the changes I've made so far have all been through the CLI. Are you suggesting I change something else via the ini file?

Thanks,

- suds

Don't you mean DHCP rather than DNS?

In reply to a post by Suds:

Although I do know how to download, edit and upload the ini file, the changes I've made so far have all been through the CLI. Are you suggesting I change something else via the ini file?

I used to do it with an earlier version of the router!

The Plusnet forum might be another source of useful information.

Edited by Michael_Chare (Fri 15-May-15 01:25:29)

@mugwumpx - With hostmgr enabled, in certain situations, it is the DNS server (or rather the data it serves) that can go wrong - the IP addresses associated with certain hostnames can change so subsequent DNS queries for those hostnames return the wrong IP address. So yes, I did mean DNS in this case. I mentioned the DHCP server too as I wanted to confirm that DHCP address allocations still correctly updated the DNS server with device names where the device supplied one.

Both DHCP and DNS servers appear to be ok with hostmgr disabled, again, I was really just hoping to confirm that this wasn't causing any problems that I haven't yet noticed.

Thanks,

- suds