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3G Fallback: USB Dongles
3G Fallback: USB Dongles
3G Fallback: USB Dongles
USB Dongles
Jon Morby - 2017-04-13 - 0 Comments - in Fire Brick
3G Fallback
The 2700 model has a USB port that can be used with a 3G dongle for connectivity
and/or fallback. The FireBrick 2500 does not have a USB port. By using a 3G dongle
with 1 or more FTTC/ADSL lines from AAISP you'll be able to fall back to using 3G in
the case of the FTTC/ADSL going down - this includes routing of your public IPv4
blocks and IPv6 blocks (IPv6 via a tunnel). -note, 4G dongles may have a problem
with routing public IPs to the FireBrick as they act as a NAT device. In these cases
using a L2TP tunnel will enable the IPs to be routed.
Working 3G Dongles
Dongles do vary, and drivers may need to be written to support a particular dongle.
Contact us if you have one which is not working. The following dongles are known to
work on a FireBrick 2700:
Huawei E156G (Available from AAISP)
ZOOM model 4598 (Discontinued)
Huawei E353 (Three branding)
Huawei E170 (BT Branding)
Huawei E1752Cu (O2 Branding)
ZTE MF112 (Three branding)
Working 4G Dongles
Many 4G LTE dongles work by acting as an Ethernet device and perform NAT
between the mobile network and the interface presented to the FireBrick. These
types of dongles should work OK. If your A&A IP blocks are needed to be routed to
the FireBrick whilst on 4G then using L2TP would be a way to achieve this. We'll be
expanding this section with more details and information as we test further dongles.
Basic Config
If you have an AAISP data SIM, the FireBrick can be configured to use this as a
backup connection, by using a 3G dongle plugged into the USB port. Any routed
legacy IPv4 blocks will continue to work across this link, but so far IPv6 isn't
supported (without using a tunnel). The example below is all you need to get the
dongle configured. If your main broadband connection goes down, the FireBrick will
automatically switch to use the 3G connection, then back again once your main
connection is back.
<usb>
<dongle username="me@a.2" password="secret"/>
</usb>
Example Config
LAN Interface for IPv6 tunnel over 3G dongle (with MTU 1500):
LAN Interface for IPv6 tunnel over 3G dongle (with MTU 1492):
<interface name="LAN" port="LAN" ra-client="false">
<subnet ip="2001:8b0::1/64 10.0.0.1/24" ra="true" ra-
mtu="1472" ra-dns="2001:8b0::2020 2001:8b0::2021"/>
</interface>
Connect to AAISP over PPPoE session (3G dongle tweaks and NAT):
<usb>
<dongle name="AAISP-3G" username="me@a.3" password="secret"
graph="AAISP-3G" profile="AAISP-3G"/>
</usb>
This example is taken from a site which has 2 ADSL lines - hence the No-DSL profile
being based on ADSL1 and ADSL2 being up. The AAISP-3G profile is then active
during office hours, but it will become active if both of the ADSL lines are down
outside of office hours.
You can tell when the swap over happened as the latency increases and then
decreases again when the DSL came back online.
Telnet Commands
Reset the USB controller and re-detect everything from scratch:
clear usb
show dongle