Vodafone Connect Router as a bridge

[theuksandman]

Hi all,

Has anyone recently been able to have their Vodafone Connect router in a passive/bridge mode and have another router connected to do all the heavy lifting? My plan was to essentially turn off Wifi, DHCP etc on the Vodafone Connect and then have another router with Adanced Tomato installed which will have DHCP, WiFi etc and will connect to all my other devices. I've been trying all ways of doing this over the last few nights but although I can get both routers to pretty much look like they will play together - DNS does not work correctly at all. I've tried using all variations of IP ranges, class A, B and C but not having much look.  I had a very similar setup on Sky when I used their Sky Hub as a bridge to a DLink DIR868 and this worked fne but it seems either I'm missing something crucial or the Vodafone Connect does not play nicely if trying to use it as a bridge.

Any advice is always appreaciated - if you have got this working then if you could share any IP examples that would be ace too. I just need to know if this is possible and then I can focus on getting DNS working correctly on the 'main' router. Cheers, Steve.

[Anonymous]

Tried various combinations of this myself.  If you look at the logs the router you are using is creating, then you'll probably find that you are creating a whole load of "destination unreachable" errors - even though it pretty much the same settings as you'd need for using an xDSL modem.  The other issue from the logs when I tried this, was that it is impossible to get UPnP working on the network when the Vodafone modem/router is connected.

There is at least one person on here who has managed to get "something" working just by "double-NATting" - that is plugging a cable from a local port on the modem/router to the WAN port on a cable router - but again for myself and others that leads to lost packets, and other issues regards common network service provision being mishandled.

One tip I can give you, is that rather than always digging into the network logs to see what's happening, a couple of phone apps - Fing and Network Analyser - can give you a quick indication of what is going on/wrong.

*If you do manage to get this working properly, let us all know, because there'll be plenty on here who are curious!

[machare]

The Vodafone router can't be configured to run in bridge mode so than another router with a Wan ethernet port can establish a PPPoE connection.  You can connect the Wan ethernet port of another router to the Vodafone router. That would give you double NAT which is not to bad if you don't have any incoming connections needing port forwarding.  You can connect the normal ethernet ports of another router to the Vodafone router and use the 2nd router's wifi but not DHCP. See

Sadly, the Vodafone router is not good at handling wifi or maintaining a good DSL connection.

[o0timbo0o]

This is how I have my set up. Everything on the Vodafone router is turned off and I have a single wired connection from my ubiquiti usg wan port connected to the voda router. The ubiquiti USG wan port is dhcp by the voda. I have much ubiquiti goodness an everything works great but in a different ip range (as configured in the USG). I have 192.168.1.x as the range on my voda router ( only 1 address via dhcp.. The USG). The usg has its own network (192.168.0. X). Everything has been great.. Seamless until I wanted to port forward incoming http to a Webserver on the USG network. This is where things fall apart and I'm struggling to understand how this incoming data can be routed. I have port forwarded to the USG using the voda port forwarding page  in the hope the usg will pick it up and forward it on using the config it has. This didn't work. I even placed the USG ip in the DMZ and that did not work either. I then read this post and obviously there's a problem. Can you explain why this double forwarding doesn't work in the absence of being able to stick the voda router in bridge mode. 

[Anonymous]

The easiest way is to give you a link to https://www.pcworld.com/article/3175739/how-to-identify-and-resolve-double-nat-problems.html which explains the problem and gives a few ways to try and solve it.  I suspect that the easiest way to solve this is going to be to get your username and password from VF and then swap the supplied modem/router for a VDSL2 modem and have your USG connect to that.

*A nice break from tearing my hair out over the malfunctioning wordpress servers!

[GY]

This is what I've done today with my one week old Gigafast setup ,

I knew I wanted to use my own router from the outset.

I obtained my user name and password via chat who have been very helpful so far.

I was already using my new Asus RT-AX58U with my previous VDSL connection so most of the config was already in there just had change the PPOE user name and password and setup VLAN 911.

All worked perfectly but not able to use the phone of course as VF stupidly put the phone socket on the router instead of the ONT like Openreach fibre installations.

I never really used the landline when I had one previously but it irked me that I couldn't use my Gigafast phone capability so I set about inserting the fuggly VFG3000 router as a gateway which I stuffed under my desk, I disabled everything I could except the firewall, automatic wan DNS and pointed DMZ to the Asus IP which bypasses the first layer of NAT. 

I changed the VF hub IP range to 192.168.2.xxx and set the VF hub IP address to 192.168.2.1.

On the Asus I changed the Asus connection type from ppoe to static IP and set it at 192.168.2.2 and gateway to 192.168.2.1

The Asus Lan stuff I didn't have t touch, everything come together and my 20 or so devices know no difference with all DNS requests going to the Asus.

And the phone works   Whether I keep like this I'm not sure at the moment as I don't like the extra box and cables.