Router forgetting MAC addresses.
subtraho1
Enthusiast - Level 1

Greetings all,

I've been having issues lately with my Verizon router's (MI424WR) MAC address filtering feature. I have it set to only allow connections from MACs on the list, and have generally been successful using this feature until lately. Now, whenever I enter a new MAC, it seems to forget whatever MAC I entered immediately previous to that one.

Here's an example to help illustrate what I mean:

1. Add Device 1's MAC to list. Device 1 connects just fine.

2. Add Device 2's MAC to list. Device 2 connects just fine, but Device 1 can no longer connect.

3. Check MAC list, and sure enough Device 1 isn't in there anymore!

4. Re-add Device 1. Device 1 connects fine again, but now Device 2 can no longer connect.

And so on ad infinitum. You can see my frustration. It's like the device has a hard limit on MAC addresses in its "whitelist" and just deletes the previous entry whenever I add a new one. This is not ideal behavior.

I've considered just wiping the entire MAC list and starting over, but if I'm not sure that will solve the issue I'd rather not go through the work of rebuilding the entire list if I can avoid it.

Any ideas? I wish I could just go back to my old Belkin dualband router, I never had any issues like this with it and it had much better range.

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Re: Router forgetting MAC addresses.
Anti-Phish1
Master - Level 1

@subtraho wrote:

It's like the device has a hard limit on MAC addresses in its "whitelist"


It does.  I believe the limit is 10.  How many do you have?

Re: Router forgetting MAC addresses.
subtraho1
Enthusiast - Level 1

Ha - probably 10, then. That's an absurdly low limit - it's 2011 and everything has wireless these days.

I guess I will just have to rebuild the list by priority and deal with it. This is extremely inconvenient.

I'm a software engineer and this kind of error condition (removing the last item in the list in order to add a new one, silently with no warning to the user) in a shipped product is very poor design.

Thanks, though! Your help is much appreciated.

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Re: Router forgetting MAC addresses.
smith6612
Community Leader
Community Leader

Not the first time I've heard and have seen of such programming taking place. I have a Linksys router which is currently sitting around collecting dust (saved as a spare router in case my current DD-WRT loaded one dies) which has according to the GUI 30 MAC address filters it can apply. It works fine up to the first 10 devices. Anything else is ignored by the programming. Not along the lines of Delete as you go, but it's annoying none the less.

Granted, MAC Address filtering doesn't do much for you once the network encryption has been broken.

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Re: Router forgetting MAC addresses.
dslr595148
Community Leader
Community Leader

The problems with MAC Address Filtering are:

#1 They are always sent in the clear.

#2 They can spoofed/cloned.

#3 If an attacker does not know how to spoof/clone the MAC Address, if you are not using any encryption all of your data is sent in the clear.

Please stop wasting your resource(s). For a wireless network, I would suggest using the highest level of encryption all of your equipment supports - Wireless encryption types include: WEP, WPA, and WPA2.

Another type of encryption is SSL (regardless if wired or wireless).

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