Resolved: T-Mobile CellSpot connectivity issues
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Since past week I have been trying to get my T-Mobile CellSpot connect to T-Mobile network(208.54.0.0). Have turned on NAT reflection and NAT UDP ports 123, 500 and 4500. For some odd reason the firewall is blocking the CellSpot communication ports. This used to work fine till v2.2 but since I have updated to v2.3 the CellSpot has connectivity issue which was all plug and play in the past. I see the firewall states show the Cellspot is creating a connection on ports 500 and 4500 to the T-Mobile network but the data is not going pass the firewall.
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Looks like it has two-way communication to me.
Those devices just establish an outbound IPsec connection to the mothership for all call data. That is consistent with the traffic on 500 and 4500 you are seeing.
Zero to do with NAT reflection so you are chasing phantoms there.
What, exactly, did you do for ports 123, 500, and 4500?
What is being blocked? Show the block hits in the logs.
Post your rules on the VOIP interface.
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They are simple UDP port forwards on WAN directing to the cell spot IP. Yes, it should be a two way IPsec connection but auto created rules by NAT show no traffic going through. The cellspot keeps resetting itself after every few failed connecton attempts.
EDIT: Just put the CellSpot directly behind the modem and it works fine. No new changes were done in the settings from v2.2 to v2.3. Did a clean install multiple times and did no changes to the default settings as well. Definitely a bug in the v2.3.2 firewall.
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You do not need port forwards. The cell spot connects outbound. You might very well be hosing up IPsec with them.
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You do not need port forwards. The cell spot connects outbound. You might very well be hosing up IPsec with them.
I never did forward ports in the past. It tried NAT port forwarding on v2.3.2 since the normal setup was not helping. Online search showed some folks had success when they opened UDP ports 123, 500 and 4500.
For some reason the communication between the cellsport and T-Mobile is being either blocked or the handshake is not as expected. One port on these forums showed disabling PF scrubbing helped but I had no luck with that.
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If it is being blocked it should be logged. Where are these logs?
People think all kids of strange things they do "fix" things. Bottom line is if a cell spot needed an inbound connection forwarded nobody could get them working. That's why they use IPsec. You want to be sure you haven't done something silly like remove the static port 500 entry in outbound NAT. There were not any changes to outbound NAT that I know of between 2.2 and 2.3. Nothing substantial anyway.
Have you even tried seeing what T-Mobile thinks of your connection to them or are they absent? They're the ones you're paying.
what states do you have for 208.54.X.X on WAN? In fact, when you see states like that on the VOIP interface, what states do you have on all interfaces for that outside IP address?
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Here are the states on WAN. No NAT port forwards or reflection. Fresh default install of pfSense. Those connections will go down to 2 after a few tries and then cellspot keeps trying for some time before making new connections.
I called T-Mobile yesterday and they transferred me to the Cellspot specialist team. They tried trouble shooting the issue but in the end they said there is no response from the CellSpot when its behind the router as port 4500 is blocked. When its behind the modem they immediately see it as it self initializes and calls T-Mobile using ports 123, 500 and 4500.
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This is from one I have access to. It's on 2.3.1_5. The port 500 state is long gone.
LAN udp 208.54.66.205:4500 <- 172.24.128.198:4500 MULTIPLE:MULTIPLE 5.199536 M / 6.616718 M 1.00 GiB / 963.63 MiB
WAN udp OUTSIDE_IP:18887 (172.24.128.198:4500) -> 208.54.66.205:4500 MULTIPLE:MULTIPLE 5.199536 M / 6.616718 M 1.00 GiB / 963.63 MiBShe says it's working fine. It took a LONG time to finally sync up so if you have good, two-way traffic on UDP 4500 (indicated by MULTIPLE:MULTIPLE and increasing counters in both directions) I would let it do its thing for a while.
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they said there is no response from the CellSpot when its behind the router as port 4500 is blocked.
Geniuses. Of course it's blocked to unsolicited inbound traffic. That's why it makes OUTBOUND connections on 4500 (ESP NAT-T).
I would let it sit. It looks like it has what it needs. Patience.
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It has been sitting on it since last 24 hours :D
New connections are like this for a while.
VOIP udp 10.2.1.16:4500 -> 208.54.90.23:4500 NO_TRAFFIC:SINGLE 1 / 0 29 B / 0 B
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Like Derelict said- get rid of the port forwards. I generally build a firewall rule on the WAN that shows source (AT&T network) and destination (range where we have all the cellspots) but its not necessary. I found it helps in the rare instance where the firewall was dropping the cellspot states for whatever reason. But no port forwards!
Is your cellspot assigned an address in your static DHCP table? If so change its address to something else and let it try again. Or if its not- assign it an address to grab that is not what it is now. See if that helps.
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This is from one I have access to. It's on 2.3.1_5. The port 500 state is long gone.
LAN udp 208.54.66.205:4500 <- 172.24.128.198:4500 MULTIPLE:MULTIPLE 5.199536 M / 6.616718 M 1.00 GiB / 963.63 MiB
WAN udp OUTSIDE_IP:18887 (172.24.128.198:4500) -> 208.54.66.205:4500 MULTIPLE:MULTIPLE 5.199536 M / 6.616718 M 1.00 GiB / 963.63 MiBShe says it's working fine. It took a LONG time to finally sync up so if you have good, two-way traffic on UDP 4500 (indicated by MULTIPLE:MULTIPLE and increasing counters in both directions) I would let it do its thing for a while.
That's the issue. The counters do not increase. Some small bytes and then the connection is reset by the CellSpot as it tries a new server. I used to see the counters increase with good traffic on the older versions but haven't see them since moving to v.2.3.2
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Like Derelict said- get rid of the port forwards. I generally build a firewall rule on the WAN that shows source (AT&T network) and destination (range where we have all the cellspots) but its not necessary. I found it helps in the rare instance where the firewall was dropping the cellspot states for whatever reason. But no port forwards!
Is your cellspot assigned an address in your static DHCP table? If so change its address to something else and let it try again. Or if its not- assign it an address to grab that is not what it is now. See if that helps.
Did all this many times since last week :)
Its on a fresh build with default settings. No changes and no NAT port forwards. I usually assign an IP address and have even moved it to different networks from VoIP network to LAN and let it acquire its own IP address. Even created an alias with T-Mobile network and gave it top preference on the rules. Saw the initial small bytes of communications and then nothing. None of this helped.
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Dude. It's not the firewall unless you broke it trying to "fix" it. Maybe undo everything you have done and restart the cell spot. when I was at her house I got tired of waiting but the states looked good so I left. She called me a few hours later and said it was up.
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Did you pay your bill?
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Does it have a good GPS lock? My Verizon unit will not attempt a connection unless the GPS is working.
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We had to be sure the GPS antenna was in a window too.
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Dude. It's not the firewall unless you broke it trying to "fix" it. Maybe undo everything you have done and restart the cell spot. when I was at her house I got tired of waiting but the states looked good so I left. She called me a few hours later and said it was up.
As I said, it's on a fresh install with default settings. I did reset the CellSpot and when it worked I did see a large download on the CellSpot so I new it was doing it's thing. But that was an increase in counters and traffic graphs showed the data as well. Right now it hasn't moved more than 1.24MB of data since last 4 hours. Did multiple resets (rest to default and not just power reset) on the CellSpot. T-Mobile sent me a replacement which is behaving the exact same manner. Runs fine directly behind the modem but fails behind the router.
I have been suspecting DNS Resolver but it hasn't given issues to all my other network. May be T-Mobile is using some weird IP address that the DNS is not able to resolve even with DNS forwarding option. Just shooting in the dark as I am running out of options and its getting frustrating as I barely have any cell signal inside the house and this CellSpot is used by 4 lines in the family.
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Does it have a good GPS lock? My Verizon unit will not attempt a connection unless the GPS is working.
Yeah its sitting right next to the window with the GPS connected. The power light (and that's the only light) keeps blinking and it doesn't even go the next step of acquiring a GPS signal. When behind the modem, I can see the network cable lights blink rapidly and it still acquires a GPS signal though after a good 15-20 mins) down in the basement. All lights turn solid green with 4G LTE blinking on data. But when behind the router just the power light blinks and blinks and blinks.. :D
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Current states.. You can see its trying to connect to a different server. Also look at the Bytes.
