Sure Signal stops working

[Enebesniak]

Just thought I'd share my experience with these things.

I work for an IT company with various customers using SureSignal's with no problems. But in the past month or so these customers SureSignal boxes stop working. They have individually spoken to Vodafone and logged independant calls. Some have recieved replacement boxes, others have not. In the end they all still no longer work and Vodafone blamed local equipment problems.

It looks like the SureSignal works fine on personal broadbands, BT for example, which is what Vodafone say on these forums. But as soon as it comes to a SureSignal on a corporate network, they run out of ideas. I can't even see a list of supported Routers.

The annoying thing is that 1, we can't get onto the SureSignal boxes to see exactly what is the problem (VPN not being created, authentication etc) and 2, most of the suggestions say to try something and leave it for 1 or 24 hours.

I suspect that there has been some sort of change at Vodafone and the local routers no longer work.

After spending hours researching and testing I can only confirm that the Sure Signal's seem to work on Draytek Vigor 2830, even without having to specify prot forwarding. The problem is I have to now convince the customers to spend £145 on router when then old one was working fine and still connects to the internet fine. 

[Retired-Matt_Vo]

Hi

Please take a look at our Sure Signal Troubleshooting thread. If this doesn’t resolve your query, please post your reply either below, or in the relevant thread, together with the details requested, including the following information.

Your speed test results from here.

Your ping test results from here.

Your external IP address from here.

The results of a traceroute.

Your Sure Signal serial number:

VSS Traceroute command

On a PC:

Click on Start and select Run

Type CMD into the Run box and press enter/click ok

A black box will appear.

In this box type tracert 212.183.133.177 press Enter

Paste the output of this command into your reply.

This will help us get the quickest possible resolution for you.

Thanks

Matt
Moderator

[Retired-Andy]

Hi Enebesniak,

Due to the vast numbers of routers available, we don’t have a list of supported ones.

Check to make sure your customers have got the following ports open/forwarded on their routers:

Port Number

8          TCP      UDP

50         TCP      UDP

53         TCP      UDP

67                     UDP

68                     UDP

123                   UDP

500                   UDP

1723     TCP      UDP

4500                 UDP

33434 - 33445    UDP

For those using a corporate firewall, check to make sure the Sure Signal has permission to pass through.

If the suggestions don’t help, we’ll need the information requested by Matt to be able to dig a little deeper.

Thanks,

Andy

[Enebesniak]

I appreciate the info but I went through all of this before and then got the "must be a local IT issue" 

My issue is that everything was fine running on a £40 router, then out of no where it didn't work, not for one person but at least 3. Vodafone said they changed nothing, so the customer's then on my back to solve this. 

Imagine if I didn't have a customer with a router I know worked, how would I have found which one did? Bought 5, configured them with all the aditional routing for remote access etc and then tested each one? That would have taken up a vast amount of time and cost.

I've already solved the problem so this was more for anyone searching who had similar problems. 

[grolschuk]

What flavour suresignal are they?

What lights are showing?

I've seen a couple that have just stopped out of the blue, with all the lights on fine, but not talking to any handsets.

A re-push of the firmware seems to fix it and get things running again.

However is a flashing sequence of trying to connect, it is indeed strange that something that was working now does not.

There are any firewalls provided by the ISP that could have been tweaked and now getting in the way? I know Plus Net have one on their ADSL lines that needs disabling to make things run ok.

Hopefully you can get to the bottom of it, I've got around 20 dotted around the country, all on different flavours of home and business broadband, and once they are up and running i've not known any to just stop connecting to vodafone 

[Enebesniak]

Hi, 

The light sequence suggested that it wasn't connecting. They even had a new Sure Signal v3 (same as the previous one) with the same result.

It only worked after I changed the router. 

Went through the same procedure with the second user, who was a home user connecting via FTTC. If he connected it to his second line which was a bog standard BT Homehub it worked fine. Again, worked when I sent him a Draytek router. His was more straght forward as he had no additional routing, unlike the previous customer. 

[Ben_H]

Hi Enebesniak,

If your customers are using a variety of Sure Signal versions on a range of routers, we have to work them on a case by case basis. As mentioned, there are so many factors involved but we can troubleshoot each one here.

This is why you'd have seen different outcomes for them. 

I'm glad to see you've now solved the problem in the meantime. 

Cheers, Ben