Allowing incoming connections with 3 dongle

Fazza

I recently had to get a new 3 dongle(a Huawei Hilink e353 to be precise) as my old one was broken and I can't figure out how to let it allow incoming connections. With the old one I believe I just needed to set an exception in windows firewall to allow certain connections to certain ports but it doesn't seem to work with this one and I don't really have any idea where to start with it.

The only thing I really need it for is maptool which is a programme for playing tabletop rpgs online and I was trying to host a mumble server(like ventrillo and teamspeak) as a test which is what brought this to my attention as when my friend tried to connect he was refused we then tried it with maptool which had always worked without any issues and the same thing happened. Both of these normally require port forwarding but since I'm not connecting through a router I don't think this is the issue.

It's not exactly an urgent thing as I have a friend with a better connection host so it's not reliant on my crappy connection but I would really like to figure this out just in case. I did a bit of a search on it but I couldn't find anything helpful(lack of sleep probably hasn't aided me). I have seen some similar issues though and it might be something to do with the APN or NAT but I don't know a huge amount about either of these and I'm still looking into them. So can anyone point me in the right direction here?

If I need to provide more info just ask but I couldn't tell you what model dongle I had before because I can't find it. Thanks in advance.

eirator

You've got a HiLink version of the E353 and that sets itself up like a NAT router so try putting 192.168.1.1 in your browser (username and password probably both admin if required) and see if you can find anything to allow you to change the NAT settings, port forward etc. Post back what you find as I don't have one here to check for you.

Wotty

Did you check the signal strength to see what sort of speeds you are getting?

If your signal strength is a bit lower than you were getting with your last broadband dongle that could maybe be the reason you have had difficulty.

Fazza

eirator wrote: »

You've got a HiLink version of the E353 and that sets itself up like a NAT router so try putting 192.168.1.1 in your browser (username and password probably both admin if required) and see if you can find anything to allow you to change the NAT settings, port forward etc. Post back what you find as I don't have one here to check for you.

Yeah I checked that there is a settings page but I can't see anything about changing NAT settings, I'll try to summarize what is there.

Connection Settings: This just has a few checkboxes that determine whether it should connect as soon as the dongle.

Profile Management: This lets you select and create new profiles although I'm not sure how these work. Each one has a profile name, an APN, user name and password. The default one is 3 ireland and the APN is 3internet no user name or password. I tried a test one with the APN set as 3internet.ie as I seen this suggested elsewhere but that didn't help. Just to clarify these are just input as strings in text boxes.

Network Settings: Has a dropdown box for registration mode but this is greyed out and set to automatic.

PIN Management: Just for PIN related stuff.

Device Information: Just has info like software and hardware version.

Wotty wrote: »

Did you check the signal strength to see what sort of speeds you are getting?

If your signal strength is a bit lower than you were getting with your last broadband dongle that could maybe be the reason you have had difficulty.

Yeah I checked, when me and my friend tested it was the middle of the night and I got about 10mbps download speed on speedtest.net around the same time I couldn't tell you what the upload speed was, it's not often I'd get those speeds though but I don't think that's the problem.

Wotty

That was a pretty good connection speed then. Problem must lie elsewhere

Fazza

Well I got it working, I hadn't looked at it since as I didn't have time and now I'm a bit embarrassed I didn't see this sooner but I'll go over it in case anyone is interested.

I went to the network settings then under network infrastructure there is Huawei Internet Gateway Device, double click under the general tab there is settings click on that and then add a service. For IP address put in 192.168.1.100 which should be the internal ip address for your computer and the port you need for the service. Simple huh?

Thanks for the help guys I really don't know how I missed that before.

Wotty

That's very interesting.

What did you enter for the port details?