Tutorial: Bell Giga Hub: Bridge Mode Setup, PPPOE Configuration with pfSense, and Essential Tips

hi there it's been a long time I haven't really posted any new content been very busy with multiple projects decided to make a very special video by end of this year my viewers are asking me on how to put this unit into bridge mode and uh Happy New Years Everyone by the way before I forget to mention that and yeah let's talk about this let's talk about the things I want to mention about this before I show you on how to put this into brid mode so this tutorial applies to the hop 3000 and 4,000 and I'm probably going to be mentioning Giga most of the time throughout this video anyway so bridge mode little secret this unit is always in bridge mode I am not making this up it is kind of funny it's always in bridge mode kind of I don't know if even you can call it bridge mode but it's always in Bridge mode and Bell does not talks about this openly there is no material on their website to my knowledge kind of embarrassing when you look at Rogers Bell Rogers literally has material manuals photos or screenshots on how to turn on and turn off bridge mode on their Gateway units that they currently have in production so that's kind of embarrassing B that you're not really have this kind of content out there but anyway I digress as I would say most of the time so that is that for bridge mode uh bypassing I won't be bypassing this unit I won't be talking about it why do I mean by bypassing disconnecting the SC fiber cable and connecting it directly to uh sfb plus transceiver on your PF sense box and that process is kind of expensive depending how you do it it is technically possible I might make make a video in the future but you don't want to do it because it's against terms and services for most isbs another reason you don't want to do it you're obviously going to lose oh yeah that's another thing you're going to lose ipv but there is a way to uh pass through ipv vlans through your pfSense and through the switch that's another thing I won't be talking about but there's a way of you know passing vlen traffic that b uses for their IP TV by the way rers has way better implementation of their ipv than um B I would say it's so much easier and better to deploy Rogers IV than Bell's ipv but once again I digress so back to my bypassing topic the another reason you don't want to bypass the Giga Hub is probably B has tools and services or whatever you want to call it implemented on their Gateway units where they can monitor the connection quality do testing and detect potential issues before they happen I hope B has some kind of you know procedures implemented because I know from my previous experiences Rogers apparently doesn't have those types of features or services or procedures or whatever you want to Define them implemented on their dox's infrastructure for business and consumer market and one more thing why are we putting this in bridge mode we want to avoid something called dabble nting dabble nting is when you have two routers or two natat Services behind one another so nting is basically a technology I don't want to go too deep into it but basically your router has a net functionality and when you have a net behind a router behind a router and you got a private IP address that's called apping well technically uh I don't to be honest when not I'm thinking about that term it's not a really good definition but yeah you want to avoid dable netting the bad thing about dable netting is when you getting a private IP address on your secondary router from the first router and that's what most people are probably experiencing when they're adding their own router to the Giga Hub and uh they're configuring DMZ on Giga Hub that's not a good approach uh you shouldn't be doing that they have to pull forward here and there it's kind of funny but yeah that's the main reason the reason we want to put this in bridge mode is to avoid double netting and our main goal is to get a public IP address on our run interface of the PF sense box also I want to mention something else uh when you finish configuring your pfSense with PPP credentials you get your public IP address on your when interface you actually have two public IP addresses you will also continue to have a unique public IP address on on the Giga Hub as well as your PF sense box so it's kind of crazy Belle giving out double IP addresses to the Gateway unit in the PFS box so uh looks like Bal is not running out of IP addresses that's another reason why B still hasn't implemented IPv6 probably it's kind of embarrassing I want to mention this earlier we're entering into 2024 Bell and you're still not supporting IPv6 for the residential Market kind of embarrassing I would say you are providing that feature at IPv6 for business but you know residential Market also needs IPv6 we want to eliminate NAD some services like Xbox need to use IPv6 so please well I don't know why I'm even begging please was that even begging but yeah come on guys get with the program start using IPv6 Rogers been using IPv6 for past decade for consumer Market or specifically residential Market TCH we been using IPv6 for the past decade if I'm not mistaken quite embarrassing Bal very embarrassing in my opinion I would say also you might want to call Bal and ask them to disable the Wi-Fi service specifically the hidden Wi-Fi service for the TV you might not even have that feature enabled if you don't have their TV service but still give them a call ask them to disable it the reason why we want to disable it is we don't want any additional interference in our Wii Network especially when we're using our own Enterprise Wi-Fi access points if you do have TV service from B you probably don't want to disable that obviously but you obviously should be okay disabling the Wi-Fi in the Bell Giga Hub that I'm about to show you in this tutorial and another thing you might have an option you should be able to use an ether cable to connect the Giga Hub directly to the TV box to get network connection if you're having you know problems using Wi-Fi on your boxes and at that point you can know call Bell and disable Wi-Fi because you're going to be hardwired in to the Bell gig hub for the TV service also I might make a video eventually in the future on how to configure vlans on uh pfSense and The Ether switch and maybe the Wi-Fi access point if you want to have your B TV box connecting to the switch or connecting to the Wi-Fi also I forgot to mention because I'm falling asleep here it's a literally 2: a.m. right now I was looking at my YouTube Studio analytics and it came to my attention I have to ask for my viewers verbally to subscribe to my YouTube channel therefore if you find my content helpful and useful please don't forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel and that's it for that and yeah let's get to it so the first thing we want to do for Best Practices we're going to do a factory reset on the B Giga Hub okay so here's my Giga Hub I'm going to wake up my unit and I'm going to scroll all the way down to let's look for this option here it is factory reset to default oh excuse me reset to factory default I'm going to hit okay right here and I'm going to scroll up I'm going to say yes hit okay again and it's going to ask me are you sure you want to do everything yes I am sure and let it run this might take depending what it's doing this might take 15 minutes and I'm also going to show you to what landport to connect this here's that 10 gig landport where my unit is connected to I don't even have phone service that's what the green Jacks Are there there completely blank and then my fiber connection but yeah that's the 10 gig you want to go to if you cannot use 10 gig for whatever reason because your network card and your router is now backwards compatible you can use any of these yellow ethernet ports or Jacks whatever their technical name is and yeah that's basically it for the factory reset you're going to get a little welcome screen here and I'm going to get back to my workstation forgot to mention after you do Factory reset you need to get the password for the web interface of the gig Hub but after you defect your reset you're going to be graded with this uh menu here with um network name for the Wi-Fi and the password for the Wi-Fi in this case we going to go back hit again and we're going to scroll down for should be here here you go modom password hit that and that is the modom password take a a picture of that because we're going to need that now I'm going to be using my computer to access the gigabases when interface should be set to thcp client if for some reason you're not able to access the web interface of the gigaa from your system through your network you can just take your computer connect it directly to any of the lamp ports on the giga and access the web interface that way and let's get to it so I'm just going to use a basic web browser as long if it works I guess I didn't double click on that and I'm going to type in this internal IP address and this IP address applies to the hub 3000 4000 and the Giga Hub and as we all know this web interface is boring as hell we can see that the internet is up and running I'm going to click on that it's going to ask me for the password and we're going to use the password that I got hold of earlier in my case I'm just copy and pasting this log in get out of here Edge it's going to ask us if we want to set this up right now for Recovery I don't want to set this up right now and right here user ID this is your PPP OE username okay I wasn't too sure where to cut this video in but I guess I'll do it here here so I was about to go live with this video and my friend tells me there's a possibility of getting hold of pppoe password from B yourself without them even giving them a call so basically when you sign up for B Services you get access to their portal the selfhelp portal whatever you want to call it so when you log in in here and I need to log in actually you be presented with these few options and you want to scroll down until you see your PPP OE username so this whole section is basically managing your internet services through web portal using Bell and you want to look for this option right here change modem access password this is a really bad naming convention it should say something like change pppoe password so you want to click on this option right here you want to enter the new password you want to use for the PPP Poe with bell hit save give it a few minutes for the changes to propagate you're also going to get probably a message telling you you need to change the new password on the battle Giga Hub and uh yeah after giving a few minutes for the changes to propagate you can go to your pfSense box and use that new password to gain access to Bell's infrastructure also if you want to continue using Bell Giga hop as a secondary Gateway you're also going to need to change that BPP OE password here as well and also you definitely want to change the password because the password B gives you by default is very poor uh it's something basic as Canada 123 or Bell 123 write it down call Bell and ask them or tell them you need credentials for the pppoe they're not going to know what the hell you're talking about I swear to God tell them you have the username they'll find this username and they'll find the password the password could be something as basic as Canada with the capital c Canada 123 I swear to God welcome to the IT world it is a really broken industry this username format without the domain name is strictly for consumers if this was a business class it would be something like client name something like let's say tech for you tyu b.net or sympatic or some other domain name basically so yeah get the username give them a call tell them you need your pppoe credentials you have the username they'll give you the password uh if they have no idea what they're talking what you're talking about ask for a better technician so get a hold of that we have that now we're going to close that out and now we need to disable the Wi-Fi I'm going to go to Wi-Fi management here and they have this option here for the whole house this is like if you have the pods the the Wi-Fi repeaters I guess you can call them they call them pods or whatever they call them uh so I'm going to disable that it's going to give us a warning message yes I am definitely want to disable that and I'm going to save it make sure you save this close that now I'm going to close this and click on it again and there should be another option here oh here it is maybe I didn't say earlier advance settings I'm going to click on that here's your advance settings for the Wi-Fi and yes this supports 6 GHz because this is WiFi 6E and we're going to disable all of this going to disable this peasant class WiFi from Bell obviously if you're doing this you have your own ubiquity or TP Link or some fancy Enterprise access points I hope and same thing for guest actually I guess guest is already off so guest is off as you can see and everything else is off and I don't have to explain why we shutting this off we don't want any well I guess I'll explain we don't want any additional interference in the house but this does not disables the SSD broadcast or the Wi-Fi broadcast for their IP TV service if I'm not mistaken you might have to call Bell and tell them hey can you remote onto my router or my technically it's a Gateway unit can you remote into my Gateway unit and shut off the Wi-Fi I don't want any Wi-Fi in my house from you guys they might say they're not able to do it but trust me they can you have to ask for some high ranking technician whatever the term is there but that's it that's how you disable Wi-Fi so I'm going to close this out cancel this out again I'm going to double check now that the Wii is off and it is off good the Wi-Fi is off the guest Wi-Fi is off and obviously you might want to check your phone I mean check with your phone that the Wi-Fi is off okay that's good to know now at this point you can technically go to your router your pfSense router but while I'm here I'm going to check a few things so we're going to go to settings right now and one thing I want to disable right away you don't really need to do it but I say disable it anyway for best practices and I presume you're not going to be using the B Giga hub for as a net device disable this and disable this for security reasons and also one thing why it's good to have access to this web interface if you go to Diagnostics actually not this that's the wrong feature I didn't want to go in here close that uh status you can see your interface status you can see that I'm connected to the 10 gig right now you can see I passed the traffic you can see the MAC address you can see the optical interface and the most important I have zero errors here for receiving and sending packets so everything looks good from here Wi-Fi we don't care about this this thing is disabled the next morning but anyway I digress so close this out one thing you might want to disable when it comes to security not disable change when it comes to security when you go to model preferences you might want to change the default password just just a good practice just change that default password after you change the default password we're going to go to the PF sense box also I wanted to mention something if you click on my devices you can see there's one ether device connected and if you click on that you can actually confirm the host name of your PF sense box shown right here obviously I'm going to be censoring this out for security reasons probably but you can see right here my router that is connected and obviously you can you know assign an internal IP address to it a static internal IP address or change it but yeah that is that when it comes to the Giga Hub it's really basic boring limited router out there and I'm not surprised why people want to bypass this I mean not bypass it but you know put this in bridge mode okay so after logging in into your PF sense or open sense or some other third party router I want to look at my interfaces so I'm going to navigate to status and interfaces in your case you probably have your Giga hop connected to the one interface but in my case that's my Rogers interface for me I have to scroll down to when two and you can see right here that I have internal IP address from the B Giga Hub and this is big no no this called dabble ning once again this is what we want to avoid you can see my MTU is 1500 keep that in mind and you can see my connection or my medium type is 10g BAS Sr so this is a 10 gabit interface on this PF sense let's go back to the top go interface select the interface where you have your giga connected to in your case it's probably when for me it's when to and by default you probably have DHCP selected for both connection types for ipv4 we're going to be changing this to pppoe scroll down to pppoe configuration we're going to copy the username that we saw earlier on that web interface of the Giga Hub and for the p password is the password that I got hold from the technician when I called Bell and asked them what's the credentials for the pppoe and that's basically it one thing I'm going to enable here and I recommend you do same thing is this option right here basically if you read it whenever B starts supporting IPv6 they will give you IPv6 prefix SL IP address through ipv4 connection link and you will see your IPv6 address on your one interface so now after once again enabling this I'm going to scroll down hit save now I'm going to hit apply changes give it few minutes few seconds depending on the performance of your PF sense box now at this point you're finished and I'm also going to verify that it's working by going status interfaces before I scroll down to B interface I want to show you something on my Rogers interface so if one day B's going to start offering IPv6 you're going to have your IPv6 address right here basically uh you can see my local link IP address you can see my ipv4 IP address right here and you can see my Mt 1500 because I'm not using pppoe for rogers's connection so there's no need for extra overhead tra trffic and I'll explain this in a minute so now I'm going to scroll down to Bell you can see my bell pppoe up status is up you can see our local oh not local public IP address version 4 this is what we were aiming for at this point you are finished you know that it's working you got your public IP V4 right here not local like this one right here and I'm actually going to talk about this right now so this is a local Class A ipv4 for Gateway interface and obviously this is a local link this is not public IPv6 right here D get too excited when you see this with fe80 this is basically for local communication on the same network and your M2 is 1492 uh you can definitely change this but you shouldn't be changing this if you change this to 1500 you're going to have a bad time the reason it's 1492 is because the rest of the MTU is being used for the pppoe overhead traffic in my opinion pppoe is a really old technology no one shouldn't be using pppoe uh really kind of killing performance of your network but anyway I digress let's continue with my Gateway thing so the first time I saw this uh Gateway IP address this local Class A I thought to myself huh I never saw this on B interet connection I have set up multiple B internet connections for business clients of ours so I was like huh this is really interesting some of my friends I have B uh internet connection here in GTA they don't have a local IP address at all for the Gateway it's a public IP address so I'm not too sure what bell is doing here but so when I saw this once again I thought that this Giga Hub was my Gateway unit so I was like okay so I guess this Gateway unit is doing routing whatever I don't really care as long if I have a public IP address on my one interface but then decided to Ping that IP address so I'm going to Diagnostics ping I'm going to select actually I'm going to paste the IP address right here and I'm going to select the proper interface you want to Ping out from the same interface where your gateway is so in this case when to in your case it's going to be when and I'll hit the Ping and give it a few seconds so right here you can see I have my result three pings it's 1.7 milliseconds you have to love Linux for this you know shows you in decimal points versus in Windows just doesn't show you decimal points but anyway I digress um so you see 1.7 so this ping is a bit too high to be local IP address pinging to the Gateway unit so I'm definitely not pinging the Gateway unit for my pfSense box I'm definitely pinging somewhere on B's infrastructure I just don't understand why they're using local Class A IP address instead of a public IP address and just to show you that this is definitely you know on their infrastructure not local you know on the long I guess I'm not sure what the right term here is I'm going to ping my uh file server so this is my uh tras file server in the wrong Network in the wrong device but there we go that's the right IP address this is my file server let's ping there the file server has copper and you can see it's uh 400 milliseconds basically so this is copper for you so this tells me definitely that I'm pinging locally versus having having 2.4 having 1.4 milliseconds versus 4.2 milliseconds and if I even pay let's say my computer that is uh fiber my computer has a fiber card oh not a fiber card but it's a fiber connection I get even slightly lower pay and the funny thing is some people say direct at hch Copper uh is better than fiber but I did some research some testing like that and in my conclusion fiber is better lower ping than direct attach copper but I digress but anyway whatever so yeah that's basically it uh hope you enjoy watching this don't forget to subscribe happy New Year take it easy make sure everybody has a good time and I'm Addie [Music] here

Channel: Tek4You

Views: 4,049

Keywords: pfSense, PPPOE, Bridge Mode, Bell, Giga Hub, Hub 3000, Hub 4000, Bypass, IPv6

Id: eXvDnGUWn3A

Length: 26min 50sec (1610 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 02 2024