modem mode hub 4

[scrappysphinx1]

Hi all, been using the hub 4 with the 1gig service for a while and i'm fairly happy except for the poor wifi range. The hub is in an upstairs room and there is difficulty with the signal downstairs in the kitchen and in the back room which my 15 year old daughter is complaining about. I also run a few private game servers for myself and friends which means i have to port forward and i've found recently i am getting limit exceeded when trying to forward a new port so today i bit the bullet and spent some money.

I bought the ASUS TUF AX3000 Gaming router and some Zenwifi XD5 mesh wifi pods.

I have switched my hub to modem mode but it doesn't appear to work. It boots and the light goes green but i cannot reach the internet at all when using any of the 4 ethernet ports directly to a laptop or to the ASUS router. 

As i am trying to set it up this how i proceeded to set it up.

1 - I factory reset the hub by pushing the reset button on the back for about a minute

2 - I booted the hub and i accessed the settings page at 192.168.0.1 and turned on modem mode

3 - i waited for about 5/6 minutes for it to reboot a couple of times and eventually settle with a solid green light

4 - i connected port 1 to the WAN port of the ASUS router. The ASUS shows a WAN ip address beginning with 82.x.x.x which seems to be correct but not a single web page will load via any of the computers/laptops or phones within my home and i cannot access the hub from the 192.168.100.1 ip address it assigns when in modem mode.

5 - I then tried ports 2/3/4 on the hub to the WAN port of the router but i got exactly the same results as above in step 4.

6 - I turned the router off and plugged an ethernet cable from port 1 of the hub (ports 2/3/4 are empty now) directly to the ethernet port of my laptop and it fails to even assign the 82.x.x.x address instead giving me an address starting with 169.x.x.x

7 - tried ports 2/3/4 with the same results as above in step 6

8 - i manually assigned the laptop an ip address of 192.168.100.2, set the subnet mask to 255.255.255.0 and the gateway to 192.168.100.1 . With this manual assignment i can now access the hubs settings page at 192.168.100.1 where it shows as Internet (Online) but i still cannot load a single web page. 

9 - i switch off modem mode back to router mode and internet now works fine again on all 4 ports. 

Any advice or tips?

Thanks 

[Tudor]

There is a specific sequence that MUST be followed to go to modem mode. Essentially that VM hub must be the last device power on. Here are the full instructions: 

How to put a VM hub into modem mode:

1) Access your hub on 192.168.0.1, sign on and put it into modem mode. On the Hub3 the bottom LED will change to magenta, on a Hub4 the LED band will be green, on a Hub5 the LED will be green. Best done from a wired connection.

2) Turn off the hub and disconnect any Ethernet cables

3) Fully initialise your own router or mesh master unit and make sure the WAN port is set to DHCP (for some routers or mesh this may have to be done in router mode before entering modem mode)

4) Connect your router or mesh master unit to the VM hub with an Ethernet cable, Cat5e or Cat6, any higher specification is a waste of money. On a Hub5 use port 4.

5) Turn on the VM hub.

6) You should now be able to access the internet and the hub will now be on 192.168.100.1

Note1: this only needs doing once for each new router or when VM changes your WAN IP address.

Note2: If you have a Hub4 and your own router is NOT 192.168.0.1 then it’s possible that you can still access the VM hub on 192.168.0.1

[scrappysphinx1 · Accepted solution]

Hi and thanks for the reply. I have actually fixed it. I did a factory reset and firmware upgrade on the Asus router and then switched the hub back into modem mode again and everything started working. Just finished setting up the 3 Zenwifi XD5 mesh nodes and put them in place around the home and everything seems to be much better. I am now direct streaming a 4k movie from my synology nas via plex over wifi in the room where before i couldn't even manage to make it play at 720p by manually selecting a lower quality and letting the plex server transcode it.