Deco M9 in AP mode acts like it's working, but doesn't seem to be
I cannot find the hardware version on anything, either on hardware or in the Deco app. Tell me where to find it and I'll let you know what it is.
Setup: I have a house and a barn. They are over 300' apart and connected by underground fiber optic cable and are on the same LAN, in the 172.16.8.xxx address space, with a pfSense firewall that also does DHCP duty at 172.16.8.1. It also acts as a DNS for my LAN. I have two Deco M9 Plus units in the house, say the SSID there is "House." I've had problems with them before, but they're okay now. The barn (I want to stress the barn and house wifi ranges do NOT overlap!) has 3 Deco M9 Plus. It's also set for AP mode. That's generally worked okay, but now I have a problem.
Current Problem: I have OctoPrint, a 3D print server, running on my LAN in the barn plus another Pi running Home Assistant. I haven't had problems connecting to those or other computers on my LAN going through barn wifi (on the Deco mesh) until today. I wanted to show my grandson the video of my 3D printer printing out a dinosaur toy for him and I couldn't access it from my iPad, on wifi in the barn. Then I tried reaching my firewall. No joy. So I pulled up a terminal program on my iPad. I ran the command "ifconfig|grep inet" and got three IP addresses being used by my iPad: 127.0.0.1, 100.95.xxx.xxx, and 169.254.xxx.xxx. Ignoring the home/localhost address, note the other two are NOT in the 172.16.8.xxx range or in any assigned non-internet acceptable subnet. But according to my settings, I am connected to the Barn wifi network.
When I go to my iPhone and run the Deco program, and check the online clients, many of my wifi systems are not listed. My own phone, that is using the Deco util to connect to the main Deco in the barn is NOT showing up as a wifi client. Neither is my iPad. I "forgot" Barn as a network on my iPad and readded it. Same situation. We have three visiting adults and one gandchild with an iPad and all their devices use our wifi, but NONE of them are showing up as clients. Some wifi devices are showing up, but many are not.
From my iPad, even though it shows it's connected to this wifi mesh network on my 3 barn Deco M9 Plus units, I cannot reach ANY computer on my LAN. Tried it in a browser, tried it from a terminal program using ping. It's not connectnig and, if it is, it's not in the appropriate address space.
I can log in, with a browser, connected by ethernet cable, to ONE and ONLY one Deco M9 Plus, the main one for the house. Cannot log in to the one in the barn. And I have rebooted it with the app. (I reallly hate trying to reboot these things - until I setup a UPS where each one was used and got them working on our whole-house generator, when one went down for even a few seconds, it took 20-100 minutes for the mesh to come back up.)
On my iPad, I turned off cellular data and couldn't reach anything. So it seems like there's some kind of handshake between the Deco mesh, enough for an iPad to think it's connected to wifi, but no actual connection. No assigned IP, no data transfer.
The last 24 hours: Within the last 24 hours I added 4 wifi devices, EZ-Plug smart home type devices. (This forum censors external links - it's at Th3DStudio-dot-com, in their shop.) To add them, I plugged them into a power strip and they each brought up their own wifi. One by one, I had to switch my phone to their wifi network, give them the SSID Barn and the password. I did that and now those 4 plugs are on my barn wifi. In fact, they are about the only wifi clients that show on the barn wifi as clients! Everything else seems to work okay, except barn wifi. These devices no longer show up as wifi access or service points. I can reach them from my desktop and they have statically assigned IP addresses from my pfSense firewall/DHCP server.
If I'm in the house, I can use my iPad to connect to my LAN and check on the webcam on the OctoPrint server (that's one example), but in the barn, the Deco mesh there is kaput. Somehow devices look connected, but they are not. (As I said, the IP address they have is not in my LAN address range.)
Questions: My questions are obvious: What's going on here and what do I do to fix my barn wifi?