[Solved] AP mode in Wemos D1 mini and ESP8266: routing network traffic and manipulation of metrics

The Wemos D1 mini and others based on the ESP8266 have AP (Access Point) mode which works very nicely but I have one problem.
When a client computer connects to such an AP it treats it as a default gateway and tries to route all network traffic through it, no matter that we have other connections active (lan, lte, second wlan). As a result, it is impossible to use the internet after connecting to esp. Also it is not possible to correctly display a page set up on esp when it has links to external sources (e.g. jquery, bootstrap, etc)

From what I can see the connection with esp has a metric of 3 while others have higher values (my current wifi connection has 20)

Is there any solution ?

I don't know if esp has the possibility to manipulate the metric.

How is the gateway set up in SoftAP?

yes:


or yes:


In both cases the same effect.

tos18 wrote:

or yes:

This is set to the edge router, instead of itself.

I can't because I won't know the network address at the target location.
That's why I use AP mode. If I had access to the network I would use STA mode and the problem would not exist.

So the issue is a bit complicated. Assuming that the ESP will ultimately be on the same IP subnet as the edge router, I would first run the ESP in client mode and thus find out the address of the edge router. Then I would shut down the client and switch to SoftAP mode and set the gateway accordingly. Of course, you wouldn't need to do this every time you restarted ESP, the gateway address could be stored in an emulated EEPROM or directly in SPIFFS.

If esp were to be on the same network then I would use STA mode, DHCP would assign an address and specify the gateway - no problem in STA mode.
There is also no problem if the connection to esp has a metric further (read larger) than the internet connection being used.
Then the connections work correctly and all traffic is directed to the default gateway and queries for esp go to the network created by esp.

Then try setting 0.0.0.0 as a gateway in ESP. According to the standard:
"0.0.0.0 has the specific meaning "unspecified". This roughly translates to "there is none" in the context of a gateway"
I have not checked.

Helped.
Metrics something around 300 and no registered gate.

Thanks again.