I’ve been here for years and done close to a hundred Balance setups. This one has me stumped. I have an older B380 running 6.3. We have Spectrum and a local ISP with static external IP connected to the two WAN ports. Everything works fine.
I have an extra Balance One that I want to install in place of the B380. I can’t get communication from the B1 to the local ISP. The connection starts by successfully determining MTU, but then fails at the health check.
I have no trouble connecting the B1 to Spectrum on either WAN. I tried both B1 WAN with the local ISP. I tried using public DNS servers. I even tried a factory reset of the B1. I’ve entered the IP numbers at least six times so its unlikely I typed in something wrong every time.
I went back to the old B380, no problem with the connection with either ISP. I can’t really blame the ISP since their connection works fine with the B380.
Talking to the ISP, they can see I’m not passing any data but they see no issue. They can see the MAC of the B1. As far as they can tell its working… but its not.
I Firmware on the B1 is 8.1.1. I haven’t tried an older firmware. Can I manually install a V7 generation firmware to test? Any other ideas?
Martin, I did try disable health check. No communication. I did not try closing the MAC. I can do that… but the ISP had no trouble seeing the MAC of the B1. They could see the MAC of either WAN1 and WAN2 on the B1, whichever one was plugged in at the time.
The fact that the ISP can see the MAC tells me that communication outbound from the B1 is working. I’m not getting any reply so inbound communication is the problem. We rebooted the ISP’s fiber to ethernet converter several times. Their device has 4 unique ports (not a switch). They even tried setting up one of their other ports. Works fine with the B380 but not with the B1.
I’d like to try an earlier firmware version on the B1. Is there an archive where we can download 7.x? Will the B1 accept a prior firmware version?
This brings back bad memories. I strongly suggest using the latest edition of firmware 7. It should be supported on the Balance 1. I would expect it to work. Don’t ask where this expectation comes from.
As for debugging, you can run a PCAP trace using the support.cgi page on the Balance 1 to see all the bits coming/going from the WAN port. Start it just before physically connecting the WAN port to the outside world. No reason to guess at the problem, this trace should show exactly whats going on.