HR44 Genie pulling two IP addresses from my router. Why?!?!

[trparky]

For whatever reason my DirecTV HR44 is pulling two IP addresses from my home router. One of the IP addresses shows as the IP address that is displayed in the Settings menu and the other I have no idea what it is or why the receiver is pulling it.

How do I know that it's pulling two IP addresses? I decided to ping the IP address that is shown in the Settings menu on a continuous loop along with the second unknown IP address. I then went to my DirecTV receiver and pulled the Ethernet cable out of the back of it and suddenly both IP addresses that I was pinging became unreachable. I then plugged the Ethernet cable back into the DirecTV receiver and both IP addresses became reachable again via ICMP ping.

OK, so I cracked out NMAP and did a scan of the second unknown IP address, it identifies it as a system running Linux (kernel version 2.6.32) and it has port 111 (RPCBind) open on both TCP and UDP protocols.

What's going on here? Why is the DirecTV receiver seemingly pulling a second IP address that the Settings menu doesn't know about? I tend to keep a close eye on all of my devices on my home network for security sake and this issue threw up so many red flags that it was scary. What's going on here?

 

[Zashel]

do you have any non-genie recievers? ala h25 or hr24?

 

[trparky]

I have a Genie Mini.


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[alnielsen]

I have a Genie Mini.


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The Mini would use an IP address to communicate with the HR44. If you have a DECA or CCK, that could use one too.

 

[trparky]

I thought the system used its own internal addressing scheme on the coax.


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[texasbrit]

All devices on a whole home network have an IP address starting 169.xx etc in addition to their normal address.. These are called link local addresses and are used by the devices to communicate with each other.

 

[trparky]

The Genie is pulling TWO IP addresses from my router which hands out IP addresses in the 192.168.1.1/24 subnet (192.168.1.1-255, subnet mask 255.255.255.0).

 

[texasbrit]

If you go to View Network Computers and Devices on your PC the HR44 should only have one IP address. If it has two, maybe you accidentally have two connections to the router from your DirecTV network.
EDIT: I just notice you said you had a client also. That second IP address is the one for the client.

 

[trparky]

I reset the network settings on the DirecTV Genie box and set it up to connect only via Ethernet and not wireless. My router is running TomatoUSB firmware and I can see every device on the network including what type of connection that it's on (Ethernet, Wireless 2.4 GHz, Wireless 5 GHz).

 

[texasbrit]

Yes, see my edited post saying that the second address is for your genie client.

 

[trparky]

But I assumed that the Genie Mini Clients connected to the Internet through the main Genie box with the main Genie being a sort of translation device that makes the connection to the Internet on behalf of the Genie Mini clients. Basically, the Genie Mini clients have to go through the main Genie to get to the Internet with the main Genie acting like a sort of NAT or Network Address Translation device.

 

[texasbrit]

The IP address on the clients is available for things like IP control and Pandora....

 

[trparky]

I decided to take a look at the bottom of my Genie Mini, sure enough it had a MAC Address listed on the sticker on the bottom of the device and yep... it matched the MAC address of this unknown device. Mystery solved.