SmartSims With Peplink’s Pepwave MAX Hardware v1 & v2

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Root Cause Analysis
• Conclusion

Root Cause Analysis

    Simetry was made aware of a few problems relating to plan changes on SmartSim portal. In these reports, customers stated that their devices were connecting to the internet and functioned as intended by connecting to different carriers. However, heartbeats were not being relayed to the portal which impeded user ability to make plan changes and assign public IP addresses. This led us to believe that this was an internal error because data usage was still being reported as scheduled.

Our networking engineers spent time working through our systems thoroughly, but to no avail.

    We traced back the issues to Peplink since we were able to successfully produce heartbeats to our platform in hardware v3 Pepwave devices and with other manufacturers (ex. InHand, Cradlepoint, Sierra) as well. We determined that Peplink’s recent firmware build releases have disabled the ability for our platform to poll the devices.

Our Solution

    To bypass this issue, we performed the following steps. First, we needed to roll back the firmware build to 8.1.0 build 4941 for our Pepwave MAX BR1 Mini LTE HW v1. This can be found on Peplink’s firmware archive. We then made sure to use the configurations that can be found in the images below. Note: You will need to access your device’s web admin page using the IP address 192.168.50.1 via ethernet, Wi-Fi, or InControl2 remote web admin access.

    To ensure that we were able to connect to the internet, we performed a traceroute to Google’s DNS server 8.8.8.8.

     Once we were able to establish a heartbeat to our platform, we then went forward with assigning a public IP address and, using the configurations below, we were able to successfully provision the SmartSim. We provisioned the sim with a public IP address of 104.234.129.73 that would be able to forward traffic to an internal IP address using a process called 1 to 1 NAT.

    As you can see from the traceroute below, our 1 to 1 public IP address NAT of 104.234.129.73 is successfully routing data to the internal private IP address associated with the Pepwave.

Conclusion

    Due to the changes made by Pepwave, customers who are utilizing older hardware versions will need to ensure that they have rolled back their firmware to an earlier build if they are utilizing Simetry SmartSims. The best firmware to utilize is going to vary case by case depending on the model of Pepwave that the user has deployed. Another viable solution would be to upgrade devices to hardware version 3 if possible.

    We appreciate the time you have taken to read through this report and your patience as we have worked through this issue internally. Please contact support@simetry.com if you require any further assistance, and we hope that this information assists you and your business going forward. We also recommend reaching out to Peplink if you are needing assistance with firmware changes.