Monday, 24 December 2012

Using the Draytek Vigor 2800V after Fibre Broadband (FTTC / VDSL)




The Draytek Vigor 2800V is a ADSL 2 / 2+ (Broadband) Router / Firewall with VPN / VoIP Server capabilities.  Currently you can get these second-hand for about £30-£40.  The Vigor 2800VG also has 802.11g wireless and are about £45-£55 second-hand.

So, you now have Fibre Broadband (FTTC/VDSL) and your old Draytek Vigor 2800V is just a Door stop. Well, at least it can be an expensive Printer Server right? You still want to use it for VoIP (Voice over IP)? Well, you cannot. Not as it stands anyway. Good old Draytek forced the default (World Wide) traffic to go out of the WAN (ADSL) port and no amount of messing about with routing in the Web Configuration Interface is going to solve that.

I found the solution!...

Here are the steps I took to get it working for VoIP. Offcourse, once you have forced a default route into the 2800V, it'll be useful for VPN, etc. again too. I am assuming that you were supplied with a new Router when you got Fibre Broadband.

  1. Make a note of your new Router's IP address. You need this to tell the Vigor 2800V where to route default (World Wide) traffic.

  2. If your old Vigor 2800V still has its old configuration, then you will need to reset it back to Factory Settings. Doing this will ensure that the following steps work and are not circumvented by some custom settings you may have. You can do this by inserting a Pencil into the small hole marked, 'Factory Reset', holding it for about 10 seconds, until, the ACT LED (Light) flashes erratically. Remove the Pencil and the Router will reboot, back to its original set up.

  3. Login into the Vigor 2800V Web Configuration Interface at 192.168.1.1 (Factory set IP address).

  4. Go into the Internet Access > PPPoE / PPPoA window. Disable the PPPoE / PPPoA Client. Click 'OK' and this will reboot your Vigor 2800V.

  5. Having logged back in, goto LAN > General Setup. Under For NAT Usage, set the 1st IP address. This will be the new IP address of the Vigor 2800V on your LAN. Remeber NOT to set it to the same IP address as any other device on your LAN, especially that used by your new Router.

  6. Disable IP Routing Usage. Disable DHCP Server. Assuming that you are using your new Router for DHCP and do NOT want a conflict.

  7. Now, add the IP address/es for the DNS Servers. Your ISP should have provide these. If not, do a Internet search for your ISP and DNS to find these. Otherwise, just enter the IP address of your new Router and hopefully it will resolve DNS fine for you.

  8. Click 'OK' and the Vigor 2800V will reboot itself.

  9. Log back in and at this point you could add your SIP account to VoIP > SIP Accounts but, it still will not work! One more step to fix this.

  10. You now need to Telnet into the Vigor 2800V CLI (Command Line Interface). You can do this in M$ Windows by bringing up a Cmd window or, in a Linux BASH or, my preference, using the PuTTY client application. Telnet your Vigor 2800V's IP address, port 23. If you have not yet set a password, just hit <ENTER>.

  11. Now type the following, ensuring that you put your new Router's IP address where indicated:-

    Code:
    ip route add 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 <New Router's IP address> IF0

    then press <ENTER>.

    Breaking this down, you are setting a default route of 0.0.0.0 with netmask of 0.0.0.0 via your new Router's IP address on the Vigor 2800V's LAN port (IF0).


    In my above example, .3 is my new Router that is connected to the BT FTTC VDSL NTE device.

  12. IF you have not done so in Step 9, set up your VoIP > SIP Accounts and you should now have VoIP again!

You can now also use the VPN Server too but, you will have to either open the required ports on your new Router or, set up as DMZ (demilitarized zone) Host on the new Router.

This solution works for my Vigor 2800V running 2.8.2 firmware.  My New Router is the Technicolor TG582n FTTC.



Sunday, 2 December 2012

Merry Christmas e-card

Being so busy, I cannot be asked to write a Christmas Card list and then write out all those Christmas Cards so, here is a e-Christmas Card I made earlier...



ONN T816 PVR fails to start

Recently, the local mains electrical sub-station failed.  After the power cut and numerous brown-outs my ONN DTR160 PVR (Personal Video Recorder), based upon the Vestel T816, failed to start up.  The display just kept saying, 'Starting...'.

I removed the mains power and removed the cover.  I disconnected the 160Gb EIDE (Western Digital) Hard Drive from its power and IDE connectors.  I switch on the PVR and then shortly got TV channels and 'HDD failure' on the display.  If it had not started then in all likelyhood it would have been the Power Supply.

Finding that the HDD was the failure, I took it out and decided to hook it up to my Linux Kubuntu PC.  If you don't have Linux yourself,  there are Live Linux CD/DVD that you can download and burn to disk.  Booting from these, you have access to a range of tools that I have discussed before on this Blog.

I started GParted (Partition Editor) and selected the last device that was 160GB sized.  This showed two partitions, a small boot and a larger storage partition.  Both of ext2 filetype but the main partition had a Exclamation icon next to it, signifying that the partition was corrupt.  I could at this point have tried to repair the partition with other tools but, as I did not have any programs I wanted to keep, I decided to format the partition.  DO NOT format the smaller boot partition!

Replacing the HDD back into the PVR it started!  I went through the Installation Setup which, formatted the HDD again and I was left with a working PVR again.  :-)


Currently known variations include: Alba ALDTR160 (Argos) • Digihome DTR80 and DTR160 (Argos) • Hitachi HDR082, HDR162, HDR163 & HDR253 (Argos) • Logik LPVR168 (Currys/Dixons) • ONN DTR80 and DTR160 (Asda) • Sharp TU-R162H & TU-R252H • Wharfedale DTR160 HDMI and DTR250 HDMI (Argos) • Wharfedale LP160DTRHDMI and LP250DTRHDMI (Argos)