In today's video, we're going to be taking a look
at the Meraki MG - which is the latest addition to the Meraki family of devices. The MG is an LTE
cellular gateway and it comes in two different variants. The first is going to be the MG21 which
has the internal antenna, which is the one I have here. It also comes in a variant called the MG21E
which comes with external antennas in case you needed that extra little bit of signal boost.
So the plan for today's video is two things: first we'll go ahead and burn through the box and
see what we have in it - next we'll jump over to the Meraki dashboard and see what it takes to get
this thing set up and connected to our network. So let's go ahead and get
started. Once we open up the box, we'll be greeted with the MG21. This is a little
bit of a smaller device than I had anticipated, though it is pretty hefty. Not too much
to see on the front here. On the back, we have a little plate that's part of the
mounting bracket - as well as we have this cover that protects our ethernet ports, our
power port, as well as our SIM card slot. Now you may notice this little rubber gasket
here - this is to protect the device. It is IP67 rated when installed properly and can be used in
some of those slightly challenging environments, should you have them. We also have the screws,
instruction guide, and the mounting bracket in this device. Now one thing to note - is that if
you did watch my video recently on the Netgear LTE modem, we did need an adapter for our
SIM card. However, this device does take a straight nano SIM card. So we can go ahead and
just pop this in with any without any adapter. So I'll go ahead and finish getting this all
set up and then we'll jump over to the Meraki dashboard and see what it takes to get this thing
running. All right - now that we got the device all set up, I went ahead and plugged that directly
into my pc for the moment. We're going to do some initial config before we get everything joined
into the Meraki dashboard. So the first thing that we're going to do, is open up a command prompt
and check to make sure that we're connected. And we do have an IP address - our IP is
192.168.5.51 and our gateway is 192.168.0.1. And that gateway should be the Meraki MG device.
Alternatively, since we're already connected to the MG and we're getting an IP address from it,
Meraki makes it easy on us - and we can just go to mg.meraki.com. And here's the local web
interface for our Meraki MG. Now we can see a couple of things - obviously, one, we see what
our current client IP address and MAC address is. We can see some specs for the MG21 - We
can see different signals. We can also see that the carrier does show as Google Fi - but
unfortunately the APN still shows t-mobile.com, which is incorrect. Since I'm using Google Fi as
a carrier, we're gonna have to go ahead and change that - to make sure that we can actually connect
successfully. On top of that we also see below, that the cell gateway is not currently connected
to the Cisco Meraki cloud. That's going to be two reasons: one the LTE network isn't working yet
- because we haven't configured it. And two, the current LAN interface that I have is just
connected straight to my PC - so there is no network connection out that direction. Let's
go ahead and hit the configure tab. And it's going to ask us for a username and password - our
username is going to be the device serial number. And we'll go ahead and sign in with no password.
We have a couple of different options here that we can configure for the MG - but the one that we
care about is "Cell Override for APN". We'll go ahead and say "Override SIM Settings" - and for
APN we'll change this to "h2g2" for Google Fi. Next we'll go ahead and click save and go back
to the connection page. We'll refresh this once or twice while we wait for it to connect. After a couple of minutes, we can see on
our connection page that we are connected at 4G with our carrier Google Fi -
and the APN that we had configured. We are getting a IP address from our
cellular provider - and according to the MG, it is connected to the internet. Now it's
having a little bit of trouble connecting to the Cisco Meraki cloud at the moment, but
we'll go ahead and fix that later. For now let's go ahead and hop back over to the dashboard
and start getting this added to our network. So the first thing that we're going to do
- is go over to organization > inventory, so we can claim the device. Up in the
upper right corner, we'll see "Claim". And in here, we can add the device serial
number, or the order number, in order to just import all the serial numbers from that
order. Let me just go ahead and do that now. And we'll go ahead and hit "Claim". And it does now show that we have claimed our
Meraki MG21 as part of our network. Next we'll go ahead and double check that we have our license
added as well. So we'll go over to organization and license info. When we went to claim the
device, since we entered the order number, rather than just the device serial number, it also
imported our license info as well - so we can see that we are licensed for one MG cellular device.
All right - now that we've checked all of that, the next thing that we need to do is go ahead
and add the MG to our existing network. Right now I only have a single wireless access point,
which is why you only see the wireless tab on the left side. So we'll go ahead and
go up to Network Wide > Add Devices, and we'll see our MG up here. Click on the check
box and click "Add Device". Now with any luck we should see cellular gateway pop up on
the left side, once we refresh the page. Sure enough, there it is. Looks like the settings
for this are going to be pretty simple - so let's go to "Monitor" first and see if our cell
gateway is even connected to the dashboard yet. It's still offline for the moment,
but we can go ahead and pre-configure it now. Let's go up to cell gateway settings.
Checking out some of the settings for the Meraki MG - it looks like our options are going to be
pretty simplistic. The only operational mode supported for the MG right now is routed mode,
which means that the MG acts as a NAT device and will translate the public/cellular provider
IP address to anything that's hidden behind it. In my case, since I'm just plugging this
straight into my external firewall and will be using it from there, I don't really care as
much about these settings - since my firewall is just going to consume whatever DHCP address
is handed to it, and use that as the upstream internet provider. But if we go ahead and click
on this, it does look like we have the option of changing what our default DHCP pool is - as well
as how big of a subnet we want carved out of that pool for client addresses. We'll go ahead
and hit cancel for now. And it does look like it also auto assigns the MG management IP, which
I'm fine with. If we scroll down a little bit... looks like we have some options for
DHCP - the default lease time is a day, we'll go ahead and up that to a week, since
I don't want much changes on my firewall. Default DNS servers is "Proxy to Upstream" - I'll
go ahead and switch this to using Cisco Umbrella. Looks like we also have the option to do
reserved IPs, as well as fixed IP addresses. What I might do later, is come back once
I have the MAC address of my firewall, and add this in here, so it just gets a static
assignment and we don't have to worry about DHCP. And so since we saw that the device only operates
in NAT mode today, we'll also see some settings for port forwarding. By default the MG is going to
block all inbound traffic sourced from outside the cellular network towards our internal network. And
if we want to allow any type of traffic through to whatever devices we have on the LAN side of the
MG, we'll have to add a port forwarding rule here to allow that traffic. One thing that I think is
kind of nice to see is we do have the ability to traffic shaping - so cell bandwidth we have set to
unlimited right now, but if we wanted to preserve data costs or whatever else, we could throttle
that down a little bit. Looks like we also have some connectivity tests... right now it's
doing an uplink test to 8.8.8.8, which is one of Google's DNS servers. I'm good with all of these
settings - so we'll go ahead and click "Save". All right - now that we've configured all of our
settings for the MG, let's go ahead and go back to the actual local management page and see if it's
connected yet. Sure enough, it looks like the cell gateway just needed a little bit of time to work
out its connectivity to the Cisco Meraki cloud. You do see on the left side that it says the
cell gateway is healthy. On the right side, you do see that the cell gateway details show the
network name of the network that I have configured in the dashboard. So we should be pretty confident
that it's already checked in, and has pulled its configuration. One other thing I would like to do
right here, is that we can run a speed test - see what kind of performance we're getting out of
this thing so far. Let's go ahead and hit run. About 130.. 140.. Oh, up to about 150 Mb
of throughput. We'll go ahead and hit stop. It's a bit better performance than I was expecting
out of this thing, which is kind of exciting. Next, let's go ahead and go back over to the
Meraki dashboard and look at what monitoring statistics we might be getting out of this. We'll
go over to Cell Gateway > Monitor > Cell Gateways. And we do see that our gateway is online. So
let's go ahead and click on it. So this MG status page is going to give us a little bit of detail
about what's going on with the device right now. First thing we see - we have two ports on
the device. Our port 1 is up and active, which is what we'd expect. That's the one that
is directly connected into my computer right now. The visualization we have here for connectivity,
under historical data, we have this set for the last two hours and this is just going to show us
whether or not the MG has been connected to the Meraki dashboard. So we do see a large period of
inactivity before we configured it - then we see some offline point after we had configured
the Meraki dashboard - and then finally the cell gateway did come online. Network usage is
pretty low at the moment which is to be expected. On the left side, we're going to see currently
just the MAC address of the cell gateway itself. I can go ahead and configure the name for it.
So we'll go ahead and set this to "Home Cell Gateway". We don't have a location set yet, but
we'll go ahead and change that later. We can also see on the left side a couple of quick statistics
around public IP, what our signal is, our IMEI, and serial number - and it looks like our firmware
is up to date, so that's all good. Now if we wanted to look at some real good data on what
the MG has to offer - let's go ahead and switch over to the uplink tab. This is going to show us a
little bit better detail about what we're seeing. So we'll still see some information around..
okay, here's our public IP, our WAN is connected currently at IPv4-only, our cell status is active,
shows the IP gateway and DNS that we're receiving from the provider. We do show here that we are
connected at 4G. Our signal strength is currently shown as OK - looks like 2 out of 5 possible bars
of signal. I will be interested to see what the signal shows and what kind of download speeds
we get, once the MG is in its permanent resting place - which is not in my basement where
it's at now, and up near a window instead. Again, we do see that we are connected to Google
Fi - and now down to the fun stuff below... for some live data, we can see what our current
uplink usage is out the cellular network or out the WAN port. There's not a whole lot
going on which is to be expected. Down below, we see the graphs just barely starting to populate
for 4G data, as well as our connectivity out to 8.8.8.8 - which again is just validating that we
have internet traffic out the cellular gateway. Once we're done here, we can go
ahead and check the DHCP tab... currently this isn't going to show a whole lot,
because we're going to have the subnet that we just configured in the Meraki dashboard, and one
client - which is my current PC that's plugged into the device. Even once I get this all up
and running, I'm only going to end up having one client - which is going to be my external
firewall. And that's going to handle sending the traffic up to the MG for internet access. As
with all the other Meraki devices, we're going to have the tools tab - which will give us a set
of utilities that we can use for troubleshooting. If we need to run any tests from the perspective
of the device itself, we can run a ping, a trace route, a DNS lookup, or even just click
in here to go ahead and reboot the device. Alright well that about covers everything
that we can do with the MG today. Looks like the setup and the settings are
pretty straightforward and simplistic. Since the device is still relatively new out
of Meraki, I'll be interested to see what new firmware updates and developments come out in the
near future - seeing if there's any additional settings, or visualizations, graph data, whatever,
that we end up getting for this platform. So for the time being, I'm just going to go ahead
and get this device connected to my firewall, all set up, and start using it. That's all
I had for this video thanks for watching!!
