More info on efforts to get orbi RBR750 working for wifi and ethernet.

This is basically a summary of a few weeks of trying to get an Orbi RBR750 to add a wifi hotspot to our household's collection of computers and other gadgets. I've got some interesting data on success vs failure over the past few days. It started with an experiment with turning off the Security Options setting. This seemed to have no effect on the total failure to get incoming  connections through to our wired web server on an ethernet cable plugged into the Orbi.

It changed when I made one simple change:  I have two 3 Macbooks (of 3 ages), and I'd been using 2 of them as development devices for our web server (which mostly serves up our music to the outside world).  Meanwhile, I was trying to find a way to tell the Orbi to pass outside connections to our main web server on a ubuntu linux box, with total failure. As an experiment, I switched the port forwarding setting for port 80 to point to one of the Macbooks, which were connected via wifi.  It worked!  The web server on the Macbook started getting connections from the outside world, and answering the incoming requests.

Watching this for a while, I switched the port 80 forwarding back to the wired linux box - and the outside connections instantly dropped to zero. I verified that I could access its server on port 80 from the wifi-only gadgets. So I switched it back to the Macbook, and our server was online again.

Note that meanwhile, ssh links from the Macbooks to each other and the linux box all worked, and they were using the Orbi for that. It seemed to be only port 80 that had been blocked.

Then I made another very simple change:  I turned the Security Option back on, to the WPA-PSK [TKIP] + WPA2-PSK [AES] setting.  Instantly, all communication between my Macbooks and the linux server halted.  All the logged-in links between the Macbooks and each other , and with the linux box, went dead.

After poking around at them for a while, trying the other Security Option settings, and getting total failure to communicate (but with all gadgets still able to connect to the outside world), I turned the Security Option back to None, and all their communication with each other came back to life, along with incoming web server requests working again.

So the summary seems to be:  The Orbi mostly permits gadgets inside its wifi bubble to talk to the outside world.  It doesn't permit connections from the outside world to a "wired" local machine under any circumstances, no matter how you play with Port Forwarding.  If you turn on the Security Option, all communications between "inside" machines ceases, and only connections to the outside world are permitted. 

Conclusion:  The Orbi RBR750 is rather unsuited for organizations (or homes) that need a router interconnect all the local devices, plus a web server to present a secured face to the outside world.

I'm sorta hoping someone can explain to me why I'm, wrong. 😉

(And obviously I haven't tried all possible combinations of available settings. It's only been a few weeks, after all. But it shouldn't take weeks to set up such a configuration.)