Nighthawk M1 Passthrough Mode

[dastrix]

Hi All,

I believe the M1 supports passthrough. Am I right in saying that when setup, the dynamically assigned IP from the telstra carrier in this case, would be allocated to the DHCP Client interface of my Pfsense firewall?

I need the M1 as a modem and need the IP to be allocated to the Firewall so I can do rules, nat, dynamic dns etc.

Thanks

[W1lliam]

When doing IP Passthrough, the host connected to M1 would be assigned with IP address dyanmically as private address (from M1), not the one from carrier.

William

[dastrix]

So if the host is a pfsense firewall, does that mean the public IP is not  allocated to the firewall? if its a bridge, which is layer 2, where is the public ip allocated to?

[W1lliam]

The public IP is assigned to M1's WAN interface all the time.

William

[dastrix]

Right, so its not a bridge as the device would still then be doing NAT, is there no way to run it in Layer 2 mode only?

Is there a device that is more suited, ie a 4G LTE modem that operates as a proper layer 2 bridge?

[W1lliam]

it might need Netgear to revise the firmware in order to support this so called bridge mode, not sure if they would consider this as many users also experiencing double NAT problem which could be resolved by supporting bridge mode.

William

[Smog]

Hi,

When you enbale IP passthrough on the MR1100, you indeed get the dynamically assigned IP from your carrier on the device connected to the MR1100.

Unfortunatelly, most carriers are doing CGNAT (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier-grade_NAT). In this case, you are getting a private IP address from your carrier and you won't be able to do port forwarding to access services hosted at home. Some carriers have an option to get a public IP address.

You have a few options to overcome CGNAT, search on Google https://www.google.com/search?q=orvercoming+CGNAT. This invloves opening a tunnel from your home hosted computer to a server on the internet with a public IP address. You can use a VPS with OpenVPN Server for that, or any VPN services that offer such an option, o for free (for one random url to access one single port)  using ngrok.