I set up a DD-WRT router on Charter’s Spectrum broadband, and had a hard time getting it to work. It wouldn’t pull an IP address on the WAN side, or it would pull a 192.168 address rather than a Charter public address.
Here’s what I had to do to fix it.
I suspect, but can’t prove, that Charter wants to encourage people to rent their routers from them, because when I had the router clone a MAC address belonging to a Dell computer, it immediately started pulling a public IP. But at least I found a solution, so if you’re having the problem, you can fix it too.
Here’s how to clone a MAC address in DD-WRT.
- Plug a PC directly into your router’s Ethernet port with an Ethernet cable
- Sign in to your router.
- Click Setup, then click MAC Address Clone
- Click Enable, then click Get Current PC MAC address
- Click Apply Settings, then click Save
Here’s where to find the Clone MAC Address setting in DD-WRT.
Once I did that, the router started pulling a proper IP address and I stopped getting warnings on the connected devices about not having Internet access.
I tried both a D-Link router and an antique Linksys WRT54G (autographed by Charles Babbage!). The D-Link would pull an IP address for a while but wouldn’t maintain it long, but the WRT54G worked. It could be the D-Link was marginal and that was contributing to the problem, so I pressed Babbage’s WRT54G, built before I was born, into temporary duty until I could procure something newer.
If you’re having a similar problem and your router isn’t running DD-WRT, see about cloning a MAC address to get it working. It will be different on other routers, but the same solution is likely to work there as well.