RaSchi’s Valhalla

Heimdall, my wireless router is reborn in the new appartment. And miraculously he changed shape (hey, he’s a god, why wonder…) On Wednesday the postman rang the door bell and delivered my Fritz!Box Fon WLAN 7170. I was waiting for it since early December. To be fair, I must say that it was announced to be available some time in December and the shop where I ordered it told me a scheduled delivery in the week of January 8th (which would be next week). So they actually delivered it early. Still I was desperately waiting for it from the day I ordered it. That mainly because in the new appartment, the only Internet connection I had was wired via cablemodem and unfortunately there is no table near the cable outlet. That is, internet work meant standing in front of the shelf with the laptop in the shelf. Not very comfy.

Ok, so I was desperately waiting for the Fritz!Box to arrive. Nevertheless it was a little bit of bad timing of the delivery since I was in the middle of preparing for the oral defense of my thesis when it was delivered. So there I was, sitting in front of work which wasn’t really fascinating. And next to me there was the Fritz!Box smiling and me as if it was saying: “Come on, install me. Then you can go to your home office and do the work sitting at a proper desk and such… :-)”. I knew this was a trick and I would probably spend a couple of hours trying to get everything done. Nevertheless, over lunch I couldn’t stand it anymore… And I was right, it was not a fifteen minutes install.

Even though it is a supported feature to use different setups, the Fritz!Box setup wizard is exclusively designed for an DSL connection to the internet. I have a cablemodem which already gives me ethernet, so I want to use one the LAN ports of the Fritz!Box as the WAN port. Which is a supported feature, as said above. Stubbornly I told the wizard to continue even though it couldn’t detect a DSL connection. If you are in a similar situation, I recommend to simply skip the wizard. Your should be able to connect to the Fritz!Box if you simply plug in the LAN cable. It should give you a 192.168.178.x address and itself can be reached at 192.168.178.1 by default. The wireless LAN is also activated by default, but it is encrypted with WPA (you can find the key on the back of the unit, next to the serial number). One thumb up for AVM to encrypt the WLAN by default.

Ok, so I have a private network now, but the Fritz!Box still looks for a DSL connection as a WAN port. How can I change this? Well, you have to go into the settings submenu of the admin interface, then go to view and change to the expert view. Then, in the internet settings, you get to see the option to use LAN1 as the WAN port. Why would they not include this choice in the wizard if it’s a supported feature??? After activating this option, I still couldn’t get an IP address via the cablemodem. That was due to a misbehaviour of Cablecom’s DHCP server though. Even though my tariff officially includes two public IP addresses, you only get one IP and even worse, only the first device connecting after the booting of the modem gets an IP address. Any subsequent DHCP request is simply ignored. Even when I told the Fritz!Box to use the IP of my previously connected laptop, it still wouldn’t work. After rebooting the cablemodem, the Fritz!Box properly connected to the internet and IP traffic from all PCs connected to the Fritz!Box is fine now.

Well, all regular IP traffic. Data that is. VoIP is still a little weird. The wizard also is designed to connect to a fix net for phone traffic. I again told the wizard to continue, since I don’t have a fixline. It’s VoIP only in Valhalla. After entering my VoIP userdata in the admin interface of the Fritz!Box it connected and registered with the service. A first call from the cell phone to the VoIP number could be received and RaSchi was indeed a happy camper. Unfortunately, calling via the Fritz!Box still doesn’t quite work. When I pick up the analog phone connected to the Fon1 port, I do get a dial tone. Everything seems to be fine so far. However, after dailing a number and a little pause, I only get a busy signal. Even when calling my cell phone which for sure is NOT busy. Rebooting the Fritz!Box didn’t help, plugging the phone into the other Fon ports doesn’t help. I can manage the Fritz!Box from the phone, e.g. the alarm feature works fine. But I simply can’t place an outgoing call. This is submitted to AVM’s technical support, I am looking forward to their response…

Update: It turned out that it was the setting for the are code and country code which seem to conflict with my provider’s system. Deactivating these options did the deal. This means I have to dial the area code even if I’m calling within my area code, but that’s the case in the Swiss fixed line phone network as well, so that’s not a big deal. Finally, everythings working now and I’m a happy camper!