Sure Signal V2 on Asus N-55U Router. What do I do with destination Addresses?

[time2relax]

Hi,

I Have a working Sure Signal V2 - Good News!!. However it only works when on my  BT Home-Hub(V2). For all sorts of reasons I am changing to an ASUS N55U Router. I have followed your instructions to set up Port Forwarding on the new router. for the SS Box etc.

You refer in your Troubleshooting Guide "Destination Addresses". I don't know what to do with these - but presumably some sort of set-up which is not needed on the BT Router is needed on the Asus Router to associate these addresses with the SS Box. Is there some protocol I have to enable/set-up for this - something already enabled on the BT Router?

The Sure Signal Symptoms are always the same - after a Full Reset I get both white lights flashing for a few moments then only the Red Light. Doing the same, back on the BT Router - all is well. At the Vodafone end - is any reset / re-sync needed for a new router with new MAC addresses etc. I am 100% reliant on the SS Box - with zero signal in our village! The new Router works in all other respects.

Hope someone can help.

[grolschuk]

The destination address is the IP address of the suresignal on your local network, which I guess in steps previous to starting the port forwarding there was a stage of assigning the suresignal's mac the same IP every time it requested one.

Also take a look around the Security or Firewall or VPN sections (if there are any) for a setting called VPN Passthrough, this needs to be enabled on some routers for IPSec to allow the secure traffic through to vodafone's network.

Was the router purchased off the shelf, or has it come from your ISP (who may have messed around with the default settings)

[time2relax]

Thanks for the quick response. The Port Forwarding procedure on the Router allows port-forwarding of appropraite ports to the MAC address & Fixed local IP address of the VSS box (this being 192.168.1.64 in my case) The Vodafone troubleshooting guide on port-forwarding mentions destination addresses that are external ( i.e 212. etc - not local addresses) these being presumably the Vodafone IP addresses that wish to communicate with the VSS. I already have IPSec passthrough enabled (by default) under a Tab called NAT Passthrough. I have temporarily disabled the router firewall. In the helpful support-web guide is the following just before the list of ports which require attentioin. -

==================================

Please see the following for a list of IP addresses and port numbers that need to be forwarded to your Sure Signal's internal IP address.

Destination IP Addresses:
212.183.133.177
212.183.133.178
212.183.133.179

===================================

Do I need to feed these (I'd call them source - not destination) addresses into the router in some place I havent yet discovered.)

I hope this clarifies things!

Cheers

[time2relax]

Forgot to mention. Router is off-the-shelf. I tried all the set-ups manually without success. I then opted to use the PFConfig utility which has a "Vodafone Sure Signal" set-up application. This ran OK and made exactly the same changes as I made manually - which made me feel better, but not much - after all I paid for the utility, and I'm Scottish!!!

[grolschuk]

Some routers have destination as the term for the internal address of the suresignal, which confuses things.

The whole port forwarding is for inboud traffic to hit the correct box on your private network, so you are correct in this case that the source would be the VF IPs (which you shouldn't need)

The traffic from these hit your router on one of the ports and protocols (combined these make a socket if you wanted to know)

The router then needs a destination to forward the info to, which would be your SS box.

Sounds like you have set it up correctly then as long as you don't have any boxes empty begging for data.

Does it make any difference if you enable all of the pass-through protocols (if they all were already ticked, untick them, or vice versa)

Then do a reset on the suresignal, if it's a plug socket style one, hold the reset button on the bottom for 30 seconds

[time2relax]

Thanks again for useful advice. The following are enabled by default for VPN inbound traffic. PPTP, L2TP, IPSec, RTSP, H.323, and SIP. The only option disabled by default is "Enable PPPoE Relay".

While the PortForwarding utility (PFConfig)  seemed to work OK, I noticed that the same company's Port Checking program PFPortChecker reports that the ports are closed - this is confusing!! I don't know what method they use to check on the status of the ports.

I am using a guide from within this forum to resolve the issue and to make some progress.

It mentions - "Your router also needs to assign the Sure Signal with a DNS (Domain Name Server) address via DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol)." Is this not part of the normal DHCP interaction when a device gets it's IP address and DNS details. This must be working OK for my PC so I'm assuming it works by default for the Sure Signal device.

Do you know if the interaction between the VSS and Vodafone is initiated by the VSS following a reset - in other words is the VSS box trying to establish a link with Vodafone or does Vodafone poll its users in order to establish a link with its VSS boxes. Not sure I'll know what to do with the answer1!!!!

Thanks again for your feedback & advice.

Cheers

[time2relax]

The Port Forwarding Option/Set-Up on the N55U Router is shared with Virtual Server Options. Is the VSS effectively running as a Server  service and therefor should i have Virtual Server selected. The options are:-

FTP, Telnet, SMTP, DNS, Finger, HTTP, POP3, SNMP, GRE and IPV6 Tunnel. Most of these I recoginise and are obviously not applicable - but others might be.

Sorry for all the questions - my head is still full of fog!

Cheers

[grolschuk]

The suresignal initiates the conversation, but then i am pretty sure it drops and then vodafone try to call it back, otherwise why would the port forwarding be needed.

The virtual server options are just pre-filled port forwarding settings, so if you were hosting a web server inside your network, the HTTP option would open ports 80 and 443 to the server that you choose.

I also can't see what having an internal dns reference to the suresignal would do.

I have just had a look at the manual for the router and it is pretty rubbish.

The only thing I can think just for doing it's sake is if all of the VPN Passthroughs are ticked by default, untick them all, save the config, reboot the router, then try the suresignal on it.

[time2relax]

Will give that a try this week-end. Am also chasing the PFConfig folk who claim that their utility will set up the router to comply with the VSS requirements. Thanks again  for your help.

[time2relax]

Thanks GrolschUK for all your help - very much appreciated.

Not that used to forums but have jumped into a Sure-Signal thread that seems be well down the road of investigating the issue. Alas this particular range of Asus Routers seems to have a bad history with the SS unit.