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ani_'s avatar
ani_
Joining in
2 months ago

Modem Mode stopped working since Tuesday's outage (Hub 5x)

I managed to painstakingly get it to work a few weeks ago with my Unifi Express 7 but last night after a brief outage it has stopped passing a WAN IP to the Unifi Router. I've spent hours and hours trying every variant of the Reddit threads and forum posts on how to enable it and it WILL NOT for the life of me pass an IP Address to the WAN Port once it's in Modem Mode.

What I did last time was the following:

  1. Connect the Unifi Router to Hub Port 1.
  2. Connected to the Hub portal 192.168.0.1 via a laptop connected to the Unifi Router LAN.
  3. Disabled DMZ, WiFi, Firewall, UPnP and DHCP.
  4. When I disable DHCP it annoyingly drops the lease on the Unifi Router so I then have to connect my laptop directly to the 10gig service port on the Hub and change its IP to be under the 192.168.0.x subnet. I know of no other way to connect to it (other than forcing a static internal IP on the Unifi WAN port which also fails).
  5. Enable Modem Mode and unplug the laptop from the service port before it reboots. Not sure if the laptop unplugging is what made it work but I've tried both removing and leaving it in today.
  6. Power Cycle the Hub after it reconfigures.

I am completely lost and it has failed constantly the last few days.

hub 5x
modem
modemmode
router
UniFi

7 Replies

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  • carl_pearce's avatar
    carl_pearce
    Superstar
    2 months ago

    Unfortunately VM won't assist on an unsupported feature.

    Have you kept an eye on the HUB firmware version, which could possibly have changed?

  • ani_'s avatar
    ani_
    Joining in
    2 months ago

    I haven't, unfortunately. It's quite frustrating as Modem Mode clearly works but it just refuses to pass a WAN IP even with MAC Spoofing.

  • jpeg1's avatar
    jpeg1
    Alessandro Volta
    2 months ago

    As suggested, it would be worth checking the 5x firmware in case VM has further tightened it down

    • ani_'s avatar
      ani_
      Joining in
      2 months ago

      Just had a look and I'm on  Software version 2.40.13-2210.4. I googled it and I'm seeing posts as old as a year ago of people referencing this firmware so I'm not sure if I should be updating it or if it's rolled out by VM.

  • Client62's avatar
    Client62
    Alessandro Volta
    2 months ago

    Some folks have reported operating a Hub 5x in Modem mode for less than a week and then needing to operate in Router mode for a period to restore the service before re-attempting the hidden modem mode.

    It is long way short of being a dependable or family friendly solution.

    Perhaps this explains why VM do not offer a VM Business connection
    in locations with XGS-PON. 

  • legacy1's avatar
    legacy1
    Alessandro Volta
    2 months ago

    If only I could get a Wireshark view of whats going on, it seems odd that modem mode works on the 1Gb port then stops My guess is the hub5x for modem mode has a badly coded DAI which they don't need in router mode and they don't want to fix it for us that want modem mode.

  • Matthew_ML's avatar
    Matthew_ML
    Icon for Forum Team rankForum Team
    2 months ago

    Hey ani_, thank you for reaching out and a warm welcome to the community, we are sorry to hear you are having some connection issues.

    We've taken a look at our side and everything looks great, as mentioned above we do not guarantee our equipment to work with 3rd part kit.

    How was it over the weekend?