LAN at home finally on SmartAX MT841 !

It's amazing how sarcasm can push your limits. While my work on cloud computing continues, this would be a nice aside, since I haven't blogged for a while. Ever since, I became a broadband customer of BSNL, I had wondered a few times about the Huawei's SmartAX MT841 modem that was installed at home. It has 4 LAN ports and a WiFi slot(which I discovered only yesterday..you'll know how in a bit).

Since I was already running on WinXP on home PC, it came with a built in PPPoE dialer which the BSNL guy was happy to use and setup the connection real quick, some 3 years back. Although I was curious about features of the equipment, I never bothered to explore it all that much. My purpose was basically to hook onto internet/use VPN over it, which was served quite well.

Last couple of days changed all this. My wife's been pretty loaded with work and wanted to work from home using her VPN. Like all innocent husbands, I too confessed to her a while back that our broadband modem had the capability to allow multiple computers to be connected to net at the sametime(although I didn't exactly know how. Even if I did and explained to her, she wouldn't understand it). So, she wanted to connect from her laptop to the VPN while I was connected to the internet using my home PC or office laptop.As always, due to my laziness, I acted generous and told her that I'd disconnect and offered her to use the connection instead. That seemed have sent her a wrong message . (Holy cow!!!). She thought I couldn't configure the modem and looked down on me as if I was technically incompetent. That's all it took to trigger me off !.

I spent the next few hours to discover that SmartAX MT841 is not only a modem, but it could be used as a router, firewall, DHCP server, WiFi modem, hub, bridge, switch...boy this was some piece of under utilized equipment lying at my home for quite some time.So, back to the requirement -

"Connect multiple computers to SmartAX MT841"...so here's what I did,

1. Logged into the SmartAX MT841 using the URL http://192.168.1.1(browser firefox)
2. It would throw up an authentication screen. Enter the username and password
username: admin
password: admin

That would take you to the homepage of the device(In case you're wondering why and how, you should read a bit about SNMP). It'll list out all basic settings, advanced settings and device config settings(you can actually upload a config file, if you really understand the format and create one for the device)
3. Go to Basic settings, click on connections menu item to view all the enabled connections on the modem. Incidentally I found only bridged connections. First off, I had to create a PPPoE connection, to get rid of PPPoE dialers that I used from PC or other computers.
4. So, I deleted the PVC0 channel where VPI=0,VCI=35
5. Create a new entry, PVC6, type PPPoE, VPI=0, VCI=35
6. Enter the BSNL broadband username and password.
7.Click on "Apply"
8.Click on "Save All"

Step 8 is going to save the settings and reboot the device. The LED for link, which was till now glowing in bright yellow, after reboot starts glowing in dull orange. At first, I thought that I screwed up the settings. Gladly, I did not. Now just a few steps away from setting up the LAN.

Go back to your PC's network connections. Select the LAN connection(Ethernet). General tab, select Internet Protocol(TCP) and click on "Properties". Generally, it's configured to get the IP address automatically. Select the option "Use this specific IP address".

IP Address: 192.168.1.3
Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway: 192.168.1.1

Primary DNS:61.1.96.69
Alternate DNS:61.1.96.71

Well the DNS addresses may change sometime in the future, but for now these are the IP addresses I got. Click OK and you should all be set. When I connected my wife's laptop to the second LAN port, she was able to connect to internet, with IP address as 192.168.1.1. There were 2 more LAN ports, so test the 3rd LAN port I used my office laptop(you must be wondering, why I haven't tried it before...didn't I tell you I was lazy ;-) ??!). When I did, my laptop was also ready to rock-n-roll.

Ofcourse, when there're 3 computers connected to one gateway and are accessing the net simultaneously, the bandwidth per computer will effectively be reduced to a third on each comp(no brainer, simple math), but performance wasn't too bad after all. I ran youtube videos on all 3 computers and guess what they all streamed pretty well, without a hiccup even once. So, finally folks, I was able to setup LAN at home on my broadband Huawei SmartAX MT841 modem. Sort of a weekend gift to my wife, more importantly to prove a point that she's got a techie husband who hasn't still lost touch with his concepts! ;-) .

Hope to return to this blog space next time on Clound Computing. Peace to All !!!.

~M