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Forum Discussion
Blubyu
Nov 01, 2017Aspirant
Nighthawk M1 Ethernet Port
Is the internet port on this thing ONLY for data offloading? Or can I hook this to my WAN port on my firewall and use it as my internet connection? So far it doesn’t appear so. My WAN port gets an I...
Blubyu
Nov 02, 2017Aspirant
I guess I will play around with it more. So far I have had terrible luck getting it to work in my scenerio. I have put it in passthrough mode and turned off DHCP. My WAN connection on my firewall does get an IP number. It just won't pass traffic after a few seconds.
If anybody else has any suggestions then please feel free to let me know :)
MicW
Nov 02, 2017Luminary
Have you checked you have the latest firmware installed. The M1 was known to put the ethernet port to sleep with the previous firmware pretty quickly. Which sounds like what is happening to you. I have mine plugged into a switch via ethernet and it provides data to my devices via that for 16 hours aday and does not miss a beat
- BlubyuNov 02, 2017Aspirant
Thanks for the advice. It’s helpful that others are using it the way I want to. I do have the latest firmware. I will say that my firewall supports a secondary WAN connection for redundancy and that’s what I’m using it for. My main connection is Comcast and I wanted this to be a backup for when/if it goes down (I’ve had great service with my Comcast connection btw). I have it weighted so that 98% of my date goes out WAN 1 (Comcast) and the other 2% goes out WAN 2 (Nighthawk). There is an SD-WAN check for each connection to make sure they are up and the WAN2 check works for about 30 seconds and then drops.
I had a Tmobile hotspot connected via USB that worked great for this but I went with the Nighthawk because I get unlimited data for the same price as the Tmobile hotspot (2G data).
Ill keep playing with it and see if I can get it to work better for me.
- BlubyuNov 06, 2017Aspirant
I just wanted to give an update to my problem.
I disconnected my main ISP (comcast) from my firewall (fortigate 60D). I then connected my nighthawk and used it for my main WAN connection. Everything worked fine. i went ahead and removed all the policies and routes from my firewall and started over. Connected comcast to WAN1 and the nightwawk to WAN2. I created the SD-WAN link and then made that my default route. I setup the SD-WAN check to ping google and everything worked just fine.
I re-create my policies on my firewall and now everything is working great. I unplugged the comcast connection and all the traffic automatically routed to the nighthawk on WAN2. Plugged the comcast connection back in and unplugged the nighthawk and all the traffic was routed out the comcast connection. I now have both of them plugged in with the comcast connection weighted to accept 75% of the traffic with the nighthawk taking up the other 25%. Everything is working great. Damn nice little hotspot :)
- PracticalGearFeb 12, 2018Aspirant
Blubyu Thanks for sharing the update. I'm on the fence about getting a Nighthawk M1 hotspot for AT&T, because I'm not sure how reliable it will be connected to a second router. At times I'll need to connect more devices, to my network, so I need to connect a second router to the hotspot.
Has this hotspot been reliable for you or does it need frequent rebooting? I've read that IP passthrough is not working correctly on the M1 right now but that people are just leaving IP passthrough settings alone and connecting the M1 to the WAN port on their second router. I wonder if I should at least have 2 different subnets like 192.168.0.1 for the hotspot and 192.168.1.1 for my main router? Thanks