More good news!
I did not gave up, hoping a FW upgrade and a different approach would solve the or avoid the issue.
This time around I ended up using a freshly installed OpenSUSE Tumbleweed desktop OS with Firewall completely disabled, with just minimal customizations across the OS (cosmetic, locale, etc), while also completely avoiding WebFig and exclusively using WinBox via Wine.
Inspecting the .wine directory I found the sessions and cache location for WinBox, and judging by some of the folders there, it appears that the initial FW was 7.11.3 from September 2023, the intermediary was 7.12 from November 2023, and then finally the most recent stable 7.14.1
So this is what happened, it first offered 7.12, and after that I got similar problems, had to reset again to get it working with WinBox, upgraded to 7.14.1 and then upgraded "LTE Firmware", I don't remember anymore but I think I had to reset again, change password and enter PIN, but whatever happened for some reason it "all" started working with WAN for the LAN clients out of the box.
Side-note: Only after upgrading to 7.12 did the selection for other branches in the Updater started showing other versions, while on the shipped version 7.11.3 it was showing 7.12 on all selected branches, perhaps this is just due to a technical thing of not not being able to upgrade too big of a leap (that's a thing with some rolling linux distros, if you don't update often enough and then have a really big one at once, you can have breakeages) whatever it was it's not important anymore.
Right now it's been idling for more than 48h hours while I was doing some side-stuff on the connected PC, but I basically just disconnected and reconnected with WinBox, so not much of poking, might be another story once I continue setting things up. Most importantly I need to setup remote adminitration for example.
I also tried figuring out what's the "supout.rif" file, but didn't find it where it's saved at on the PC. Not sure what it is but it felt like something useful for troubleshooting? Quick glance, I found no search results on RouterOS Help Pages for "supout" or "rif" other than something minimal in Watchdog. I'll continue reading up on this.
On the other hand, I also need to figure out yet to which side is this antenna facing anyway. I'm currently at a location where there are multiple cell towers all around me with multiple obstacles so it's not so obvious which it's ususally connected to and because the antenna would ofcourse automatically pick the best signal, so matter where I point I ususally get relatively good connection, and I'm inside a building, they're not going to install the antenna at this location, so it's not up on a mast yet. I watched the official youtube video for the installation, it's no big deal ofcourse, and I would assume it's pointing away from the modem heatsink, and this would be only true for the LTE18 then, because other models seem to be pointing toward the modem's heatink which is obvious because they don't have a plastic cover.
----------
One of the most problematic aspects of this was actually manual process of rebooting the router by having to physicall unplug-replug the cable while interacting with the reset button, I have no nice words for this, having to do this hundred times, the area is small and RJ45 connectors can sometimes be a pain to physically disconnect with big fingers when there's obstacles (frame), it has to be perfectly aligned, and in this case especially there's a waterproof cable restraint directly in the way making the positioning of RJ45 even harder.
If this device had a physical on-off switch it would have been quite a bit easier, isn't there an EU regulation that makes these mandatory (I guess there's exceptions perhaps).
Unfortunately I got the idea too late, I should have used my own on-off switch on the PoE injector power supply or somewhere else.
Speaking of the cable restraint, I didn't touch it further, I didn't figure out how to use that yet, there's no instruction in the manual, apparently you need to cut it by length on top or what?
Also I've updated previous posts in this thread, clarifying some of the steps, rewording, fixing sentences and removing or rewriting some of my subjective comments, speculation and initial false accusations.
-----------
Report on previous issues:
When the device "doesn't work", it will do still do LAN DHCP, and it will generate some usual activity such as NTP and mDNS, but won't respond to any kind of configuration attempts. It will refuse TCP connections, and flatly won't respond to MAC-Telnet. After the first upgrade however, I noticed it seemed to be apparently talking with someone on WAN over TCP/TLS, despite no WAN (DNS) working when I would go to Firefox to try to browse. I don't know what kind of phenomenon that was but it was connecting to help.mikrotik.com and forums.opensuse.org, which were one of a number of open tabs in other Firefox windows I was connected to while being connected to a landline fiber connection earlier, perhaps some kind of a reconnection going on.
I'm attaching Wireshark logs here:However DNS requests were filtered out of these logs on save by default, as they always just kept being unanswered and riddled the log, I probably should have included them for this report, but I can't anymore, unless I make a new scan if the similar issues reappear.
Another observation: Perhaps some of the issues were due to me using the latest Winbox version with the older FWs on the ATL LTE18 modem?
Thanks for any further suggestions.
I did not gave up, hoping a FW upgrade and a different approach would solve the or avoid the issue.
This time around I ended up using a freshly installed OpenSUSE Tumbleweed desktop OS with Firewall completely disabled, with just minimal customizations across the OS (cosmetic, locale, etc), while also completely avoiding WebFig and exclusively using WinBox via Wine.
Inspecting the .wine directory I found the sessions and cache location for WinBox, and judging by some of the folders there, it appears that the initial FW was 7.11.3 from September 2023, the intermediary was 7.12 from November 2023, and then finally the most recent stable 7.14.1
So this is what happened, it first offered 7.12, and after that I got similar problems, had to reset again to get it working with WinBox, upgraded to 7.14.1 and then upgraded "LTE Firmware", I don't remember anymore but I think I had to reset again, change password and enter PIN, but whatever happened for some reason it "all" started working with WAN for the LAN clients out of the box.
Side-note: Only after upgrading to 7.12 did the selection for other branches in the Updater started showing other versions, while on the shipped version 7.11.3 it was showing 7.12 on all selected branches, perhaps this is just due to a technical thing of not not being able to upgrade too big of a leap (that's a thing with some rolling linux distros, if you don't update often enough and then have a really big one at once, you can have breakeages) whatever it was it's not important anymore.
Right now it's been idling for more than 48h hours while I was doing some side-stuff on the connected PC, but I basically just disconnected and reconnected with WinBox, so not much of poking, might be another story once I continue setting things up. Most importantly I need to setup remote adminitration for example.
I also tried figuring out what's the "supout.rif" file, but didn't find it where it's saved at on the PC. Not sure what it is but it felt like something useful for troubleshooting? Quick glance, I found no search results on RouterOS Help Pages for "supout" or "rif" other than something minimal in Watchdog. I'll continue reading up on this.
On the other hand, I also need to figure out yet to which side is this antenna facing anyway. I'm currently at a location where there are multiple cell towers all around me with multiple obstacles so it's not so obvious which it's ususally connected to and because the antenna would ofcourse automatically pick the best signal, so matter where I point I ususally get relatively good connection, and I'm inside a building, they're not going to install the antenna at this location, so it's not up on a mast yet. I watched the official youtube video for the installation, it's no big deal ofcourse, and I would assume it's pointing away from the modem heatsink, and this would be only true for the LTE18 then, because other models seem to be pointing toward the modem's heatink which is obvious because they don't have a plastic cover.
----------
One of the most problematic aspects of this was actually manual process of rebooting the router by having to physicall unplug-replug the cable while interacting with the reset button, I have no nice words for this, having to do this hundred times, the area is small and RJ45 connectors can sometimes be a pain to physically disconnect with big fingers when there's obstacles (frame), it has to be perfectly aligned, and in this case especially there's a waterproof cable restraint directly in the way making the positioning of RJ45 even harder.
If this device had a physical on-off switch it would have been quite a bit easier, isn't there an EU regulation that makes these mandatory (I guess there's exceptions perhaps).
Unfortunately I got the idea too late, I should have used my own on-off switch on the PoE injector power supply or somewhere else.
Speaking of the cable restraint, I didn't touch it further, I didn't figure out how to use that yet, there's no instruction in the manual, apparently you need to cut it by length on top or what?
Also I've updated previous posts in this thread, clarifying some of the steps, rewording, fixing sentences and removing or rewriting some of my subjective comments, speculation and initial false accusations.
-----------
Report on previous issues:
When the device "doesn't work", it will do still do LAN DHCP, and it will generate some usual activity such as NTP and mDNS, but won't respond to any kind of configuration attempts. It will refuse TCP connections, and flatly won't respond to MAC-Telnet. After the first upgrade however, I noticed it seemed to be apparently talking with someone on WAN over TCP/TLS, despite no WAN (DNS) working when I would go to Firefox to try to browse. I don't know what kind of phenomenon that was but it was connecting to help.mikrotik.com and forums.opensuse.org, which were one of a number of open tabs in other Firefox windows I was connected to while being connected to a landline fiber connection earlier, perhaps some kind of a reconnection going on.
I'm attaching Wireshark logs here:However DNS requests were filtered out of these logs on save by default, as they always just kept being unanswered and riddled the log, I probably should have included them for this report, but I can't anymore, unless I make a new scan if the similar issues reappear.
Another observation: Perhaps some of the issues were due to me using the latest Winbox version with the older FWs on the ATL LTE18 modem?
Thanks for any further suggestions.
Indeed!Just in case:... very good practice to not jump to conclusions!
https://annex.exploratorium.edu/brain_e ... mping.html
Statistics: Posted by Dezoteck55 — Sun Mar 24, 2024 9:24 am