I went back to pfSense for my home firewall since soon I will have AT&T Fiber and need to do the bypass trick, so I decided to see if I could figure out how to get the USB800 working which actually took not much effort.
I plugged it into the MicroPC and enabled the AT port, which made the following command needed for the interface to work:
# usb_modeswitch -v 1410 -p b020 -u 2
Once I did that, the interface came up and I had Internet access. After that I plugged it into my firewall, ran the same command, and lo-and-behold, the connection came up and had access. Why did I not try this a few months ago I don’t know.
This means a lot of things for Internet in a Box: do we continue to use the FortiWiFi or do we switch back to pfSense on the APU2 or a different device, perhaps a fitlet2 with dual WiFi cards? The fitlet2 is shockingly expensive once you add RAM, storage, and an add-in card to give the storage and WiFi cards a home. It’s a pretty neat device and the USB ports’ location is better than the APU2’s. However, since I’ve got the USB800 wrangled in FreeBSD finally, I might be able to use the USB extension stand with the APU2 to position the aircard at a better location. Alternatively I could stick to the FortiWiFi as it worked great on my OKC trip or give the SonicWall another go, but the APU2 with pfSense is, in my opinion, a better device for this as it gets such limited use and having a support contract tied to something that is used infrequently seems wasteful. We shall see, though. I need to dig the APU2 back out, reload pfSense on it, and get things up and running with ue0 from the USB800 as the WAN connection.
Until next time!