Notes from bench-testing the Quectel RM500U-EA on tower, bought to
eventually replace stream's Virgin Media WAN. Like the switches and
APs, the module is configured out-of-band and is not referenced by
the flake.
Records what it takes to connect at all: the module must be switched
from its stock NCM composition to MBIM, since under NCM the PDP
context activates but the cdc_ncm link never raises carrier; and the
connect only succeeds with the network-expanded APN read off the
default-attach bearer, as IPv4.
Also flags the two consequences for stream: the SIM is CGNAT so it
cannot carry the public lease stream's WAN currently publishes, and
the bearer reports a /8 that would cover Tailscale's 100.64.0.0/10
if configured literally.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
jim, dave and the vibe AP are pure L2, but RouterOS ships ip-forward and
IPv6 forward on, and with IPv6 forwarding enabled it also advertises
itself as a default router. After the 7.18 -> 7.23 upgrade clients began
picking up the switches as IPv6 default routers alongside river.
Replace the earlier advertise-dns framing (which only strips RA options,
not the router lifetime) with the actual requirement: ip-forward=no,
IPv6 forward=no, accept-router-advertisements=no, ra-lifetime=0, and a
re-check after every RouterOS upgrade.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Place physical hardware inventories and VPS resource allocations near
the top of each box page, while leaving broader platform details in
their topical sections.
jackos1998