Kitz Forum

Broadband Related => Broadband Hardware => Topic started by: Weaver on September 22, 2018, 12:55:50 AM

Title: Firebrick and failover questions (again)
Post by: Weaver on September 22, 2018, 12:55:50 AM

I might finally have enough energy to have a go at this again.

It is time to get the FB2700 to do failover to 3G. I have a 3G USB dongle. There is some stuff on the AA support website about getting some particular 4G-capable dongle to work it it looks like a great deal of hassle.

Could I get some help setting it up and getting IPv6 working with an L2TP tunnel ?

I asked AA for some advice but they just pointed me to a page on the AA support website (https://support.aa.net.uk/Category:FireBrick_USB_Dongles) and my fuddled brain was rather confused.

• Do I simply add a <usb><dongle …  … ></usb> and that is all there is to it to get failover working? Provided you do not mind IPv6 not working? Is it really just as simple as that?
• And then I need something for IPv6 too. There is something about a ::/0 route thing but I don’t understand it.
  Quote

  <route ip="::/0" gateway="81.187.81.6" comment="IPv6 default route using IPv4 tunnel"/>

  How does that not just mess IPv6 up when in the non-failover state? Is it something to do with something like preference values (localpref is it, or something like the equivalent of a ‘metric’ in a routing table) and their default values keeping straight PPPoE safely preferred above a default tunnnel? Or do I have to add (?) localpref attribute values to ensure that the tunnel is not preferred?
  
• I noticed a mention of <ppp … lcp-rate="1" lcp-timeout="5", to go on each PPP element. Is that just a good thing anyway for all bonded setups, nothing to do with failover to dongles?
  

Title: Re: Firebrick and failover questions (again)
Post by: Weaver on October 19, 2018, 08:24:12 AM

I have implemented step 1. The ‘dongle’ status page in the Firebrick’s web UI now shows that the presence of the dongle has been detected, which is good. However the state shows as ‘dialling’ no matter what I do, so no luck. I suspect I have not set things up correctly at the AA end. But I have activated the SIM in the dongle, hoping it is the correct SIM, but not sure and don’t know how to tell for certain. So it means an appeal to AA staff to sort me out.