SmartCheck causing cellular only Max-BR1s to disconnect until rebooted

Product Discussion Pepwave MAX
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1

Hi, looking for any feedback on a problem we’re having.
So we’ve found that many of our MAX-BR1 units that have cell only connectivity will periodically go offline until rebooted.
I first was able to verify the problem was with Smartcheck when activating new SIM cards and couldn’t get them to connect and noticed the Smartcheck failed message in the GUI.
As soon as I would disable Smartcheck the cellular connection would start working and connect without rebooting.

I have also verified when we dispatch a tech to a MAX-BR1 showing offline via InControl. Tech will login too the Pepwave and cellular will show disconnected with Smartcheck failed.
They will then disable Smartcheck and the device will reconnect to cellular.
It almost seems like the cell carrier is blocking the Smartcheck packets causing the Pepwave to believe the connection is down when it actually isn’t.
We’re in the US and have seen it happen with regular MAX-BR1, BR1-Minis, and BR1-Mini Cores on both ATT and Verizon. Firmware level also doesn’t seem to make a difference.

I’ve since read within the forums that Smartcheck shouldn’t really be used when only having a single connection and we’ve started disabling.
Does anyone know if Smartcheck can be disabled via InControl without logging into each devices “Remote Web Admin”?
We have somewhere around 2500 devices we need to make this change to.

Any input would be appreciated, Thanks

2

If you are deploying routers with just a single WAN connected (cellular or wired), you can disable healthcheck since you don’t need to do any failover.

Do you have a VPN configured to each BR1? If so you could use the /api/config.wan.connection call to the devices to get and then change the WAN healthcheck status.

I think the only way to do it in InControl is with the bulk configurator but that brings its own set of challenges.

Who is it? could they be blocking ping to google.com?

Smartcheck should only kick in when it hasn’t seen a response to outbound traffic for more than 10secs. Then it runs a ICMP health check against google.com I think.

3

Thanks Martin, its happening with both ATT and Verizon and see the issue weekly.
No VPN but thought maybe the InControl Web CLI could be an option which would be quicker but haven’t researched if possible.