HCHTech
Well-Known Member
- Reaction score
- 3,848
- Location
- Pittsburgh, PA - USA
I have a 2-person attorney's office as a client that works from his home. He has Comcast residential internet, and we have a Sonicwall installed (yes, double-NATing), behind which are his two business computers and a Synology. HIs helper works from her home and VPNs into the Sonicwall for access to the company files on the NAS.
He lost internet last Friday, and after rebooting everything to no avail, called Comcast. They ended up factory-resetting his Comcast gateway, which erased our port forwarding, so the VPN stopped working, and the Sonicwall lost internet.
We now know that they pushed a firmware update to his Comcast gateway, a Cisco DPC3941T. Since he still had internet service through the Comcast gateway, I had him connect his laptop there so I could remote in and troubleshoot.
First of all, neither the default credentials or the previous config credentials we had for the Comcast gateway would let us in. It took 3 manual factory resets with the button before the default credentials would work again. Once we got in, we found that the DHCP reservation we had made for the Sonicwall was somehow still there, odd. Next, we found out that you can no longer define a port forward in the gateway inteface. Instead of the normal settings, there is this cheery message:
Entering Port Forwarding is now easier than ever! Just go to [link] and log in with your Xfinity account"
Um, ok. So, we did that, and there we found an online version of an almost complete set of configuration pages for the gateway. Including a list of connected devices, the wifi setup, and port forwarding.
The port forwarding setup would not let you specify an IP address to forward the traffic to, it only gave you a drop-down list of detected devices, which, you guessed it, did not contain our Sonicwall.
We fought with this unorganized, painful and slow interface for about 2 hours to get our Sonicwall to show up on the list of detected devices. I guess the firmware update that translated the settings that used to be on the gateway itself to the online interface needs some work.
After we could see the Sonicwall on the list of allowable devices for port forwarding, we found that the function did not work. This process seems like they didn't really think it through. When you create the forward, you pick the device, then click next and you get "port forward successfully added". But wait, I didn't tell you which ports! The forward that was created defaulted to port 1. You then have to edit it to specify which port you really wanted. Obnoxious.
Then we noticed that once the forward was created correctly, it didn't work. It said it was forwarding traffic to the named device, but in fact it was going to the wrong IP address. More fighting with this ensued, but ultimately the solution was to make the system forget the device altogether and then redetect it. For reasons known only to Comcast, you cannot "forget" a device that is still seen as active, so we had to disconnect the device from the network, then wait about 15 minutes for that change to be noticed by the online interface. Once it was on the "inactive" list, we could forget it. Then we plugged it back in again, waited the 15 minutes again, found it on the active list again and now, finally, a port forward would actually work as intended.
Time budgeted for this job: 30 minutes. Time spent: 3.75 hours. WTF Comcast?
BTW, I did take this opportunity to remind him that if he had the business internet service I recommended we wouldn't have had to go through all of this nonsense, but he's rather save the $200/mo and live with it. Me, not so much.
He lost internet last Friday, and after rebooting everything to no avail, called Comcast. They ended up factory-resetting his Comcast gateway, which erased our port forwarding, so the VPN stopped working, and the Sonicwall lost internet.
We now know that they pushed a firmware update to his Comcast gateway, a Cisco DPC3941T. Since he still had internet service through the Comcast gateway, I had him connect his laptop there so I could remote in and troubleshoot.
First of all, neither the default credentials or the previous config credentials we had for the Comcast gateway would let us in. It took 3 manual factory resets with the button before the default credentials would work again. Once we got in, we found that the DHCP reservation we had made for the Sonicwall was somehow still there, odd. Next, we found out that you can no longer define a port forward in the gateway inteface. Instead of the normal settings, there is this cheery message:
Entering Port Forwarding is now easier than ever! Just go to [link] and log in with your Xfinity account"
Um, ok. So, we did that, and there we found an online version of an almost complete set of configuration pages for the gateway. Including a list of connected devices, the wifi setup, and port forwarding.
The port forwarding setup would not let you specify an IP address to forward the traffic to, it only gave you a drop-down list of detected devices, which, you guessed it, did not contain our Sonicwall.
We fought with this unorganized, painful and slow interface for about 2 hours to get our Sonicwall to show up on the list of detected devices. I guess the firmware update that translated the settings that used to be on the gateway itself to the online interface needs some work.
After we could see the Sonicwall on the list of allowable devices for port forwarding, we found that the function did not work. This process seems like they didn't really think it through. When you create the forward, you pick the device, then click next and you get "port forward successfully added". But wait, I didn't tell you which ports! The forward that was created defaulted to port 1. You then have to edit it to specify which port you really wanted. Obnoxious.
Then we noticed that once the forward was created correctly, it didn't work. It said it was forwarding traffic to the named device, but in fact it was going to the wrong IP address. More fighting with this ensued, but ultimately the solution was to make the system forget the device altogether and then redetect it. For reasons known only to Comcast, you cannot "forget" a device that is still seen as active, so we had to disconnect the device from the network, then wait about 15 minutes for that change to be noticed by the online interface. Once it was on the "inactive" list, we could forget it. Then we plugged it back in again, waited the 15 minutes again, found it on the active list again and now, finally, a port forward would actually work as intended.
Time budgeted for this job: 30 minutes. Time spent: 3.75 hours. WTF Comcast?
BTW, I did take this opportunity to remind him that if he had the business internet service I recommended we wouldn't have had to go through all of this nonsense, but he's rather save the $200/mo and live with it. Me, not so much.
