After tinkering with it for a day, I plugged in the new edge router where the old one sat. So far, so good.

I played with the interface, tried to get things looking right, and connected it to my laptop to test on Monday. It all seemed well enough, but it’s hard to tell if it’s actually working without network connection and devices on both ends. I could ping from my laptop to the router’s WAN address, and I could ping the laptop from the router. But there isn’t a way to really test the router’s connection to the Internet without plugging it in.

Yesterday, I connected my mini PC to the WAN port of the router, configured with my gateway IP, so I could at least try to ping through. I had some difficulty before I realized Windows was blocking the ping. Once I did that, all was well. I could get from the laptop connected to a LAN port to the Windows PC connected to the WAN port. I poked a little and got the WAN PC to share its WiFi connection, so the router did a little bit more testing, like pinging through to the Internet.

I decided to give it a whirl, since no one else is around to disrupt.

I went to the data center and plugged the router in. I attached its WAN port into the Internet connection. I was immediately rewarded with a flurry of offline alerts as my servers disappeared from the Internet. I couldn’t do any of the things, like ping or resolve hostnames, and thought I’d done something wrong. I poked through the settings and found that indeed I had! I’ve been reusing the same MAC address as I change routers, instead of trying to coordinate with my ISP. I was off by one digit. As soon as I corrected that, my LAN-connected laptop could do all the Internet things.

I plugged the other devices into the new router’s LAN ports, and was nearly immediately rewarded with alerts from my monitors that the servers were again online.

I tidied up in the data center and returned to my desk for more.

I configured the DHCP server to assign the servers their own static IPs. The servers don’t need DHCP, but I’ve found that since they don’t use it, they’ll sometimes be skipped or get misidentified in some reporting or other views as they’re somehow unseen. In many cases, adding the reservation lets them bridge that gap.

It took a bit of poking to find the router couldn’t get DNS responses from my ISP’s servers. Using public DNS servers worked, though, so I rearranged the DNS list. The router also didn’t like using its own DNS resolver, so I found the setting to allow it to skip that. Devices on the LAN can use the router’s resolver, so I’m sure there’s some quirk I need to configure.

I still haven’t been able to get the router’s WAN to respond to ping, despite adding the apparently required rule to allow it. Because my IPv6 tunnel needs that, IPv6 doesn’t work out of my network, but I can ping and use it within my network, including through the router.

In my earlier testing, I had turned on firewall logging to the point where it was unusable, and it took me a bit too long to find where to turn it off. I also got remote logging and e-mail notifications working, so the router should share details with the other server.

I haven’t been able to get the router to load its packages pages, which has stopped me from doing a few things like adding ACME SSL certs, sudo abilities, and looking at other things. It seems it needs a host name that I can’t find even using other DNS.

The servers and WiFi router seem be just fine with all of that. I poked around and made sure I could do the expected things, and that the expected things from the Internet were working.

I’m a little concerned I’ve done the firewall wrong. I’m not greatly concerned as the servers and WiFi have their own firewalls, too. I made rules to only allow access to the desired service ports from the Internet, which is essentially what the servers’ own firewalls do, too. Traffic keeps flowing.

I have tested reaching the SSH and web GUI ports on the router from my phone while not attached to the WiFi, and they each failed. They worked while attached to the WiFi, so that’s all good.

I’m going to let it sit for now. It’s already performing better than the router it replaced, with no pauses and less lag on the noticeable things, like streaming movies.