Yes, I have the same topology except that my internet connection is via a radio point-to-point connection (I live in rural US; this is only way I can get a connection above 1Mbps download.) My ISP uses static addressing and the radio connection is a simple bridge (as QBZappy observed, this is the way to do it.) So my network looks like this:
Internet <-> ISP Bridge <-> Obi202 <-> gigabit switch <-> LAN
I had problems a few weeks back that made me suspect something was overloaded, possibly the 202 which is the router/gateway, the DHCP server and the VoIP gateway all at once. Since then I've come to the conclusion that is was my ISP who was having problems with someone else transmitting in the same FCC allocated bands.
As of this moment with a 3Mbps download and a 1Mbps upload bandwidth, running tweaked QoS on the 202 along with DHCP my only problems are caused by my ISP sometimes having long delays (>100ms ping from
www.speedtest.net), but even this seems to have been improving.
The Obi202 and DDWRT run the same DNS proxy - dnsmasq - and can be configured in much the same way at the per-client level, however, as you say static addresses are a problem. IRC dnsmasq does not do static addresses, rather it pulls static addresses from /etc/hosts and, while it is pretty trivial to hack on this with DDWRT the file is totally inaccessible on the Obi202.
The Obi202 has a web page to assign DNS records, however the format of the data is undocumented, the behavior is undocumented and it is trivial to make the 202 crash using it. (I have reported this to Obihai, they said it was a feature.)
I have two ways round these problems. This first and probably the best is to persuade everything on the LAN to do DHCP, I then use the Obi202/dnsmasq capabilities to assign fixed addresses to the devices I want to have fixed addresses. In fact I assign fixed addresses to everything on the LAN and this means I run into the 20-entry limit. It's not a problem for me at present, but if you want LAN host names from dnsmasq other bugs in the way Linux works (it really isn't Obihai's problem) mean you have to use DHCP reservation for most devices running embedded versions of Linux (i.e. most devices.)
The second way round this is to run a full DNS server on a LAN computer, then make the 202 use that as the upstream server instead of who or whatever your ISP provides. You can then put local LAN information into the DNS server and the 202 will just pass it on. I strongly recommend *not* doing this because, quite frankly, DNS server administration, at least on Linux, is a nightmare of 30 year old baroque configuration. I do it but I don't attempt to configure a local network - I've done it before and I've got it to work, but a day after I got it working I forgot how to do it and I think I'm better off forgetting. Now I just use my Linux DNS server to avoid dependencies and traffic with my ISP.
John Bowler
