Hi,
I am using two Halow devices and trying to connect two computers using type C cables. How can I know that I connect two computes successfully? For example, can I send a file from a computer to another computer to verify the connection?
Thank you for your help!
@An_Truong, can you confirm your topology? Sounds like you have this:
PC1 < - - USB-C - - > HL1 AP < - - HaLow SSID: halowlink1-4b2f - - > HL1 Extender < - - USB-C - - > PC2
Is that correct?
Hi David! Thank you ! Yes. I am trying to test if I can connect two PC by Halow.
OK. The easiest way to see if you have connectivity is to ping between devices, but the first thing to check even before that is to see if both of your computers are successfully able to get an IP address assigned by DHCP(and on the same subnet). Since you have “HaLow Wi-Fi devices will get an IP on your existing router’s network” selected, you will need to have a DHCP server available on your network. However, because you selected the above option regarding where DHCP comes, the system automatically puts the USB port on the AP in the same firewall zone as the LAN ethernet port for the purpose of maintaining a way to administer the AP “out of band” and the WAN and HaLow interfaces are bridged together allowing you to use it as traditional AP with the WAN port being the AP’s wired port to the network. On the extender side, I believe it will bridge all the interfaces together, but we can confirm that with screenshots from the extender side.
Looks like all your screenshots above are from the AP. Do you have screenshots of the identical pages on your extender?
Also, we have a newer firmware for your devices. Just go to the Upgrade section and check for an update, you should be able to upgrade to 2.9.x I believe.
To add on to what David said, this Wizard mode is for when you want to plug your WAN port into an existing router. Since you didn’t do that, your HL1 AP has no access to your existing router/network (and HaLow connected devices don’t have access to a DHCP server).
What you want for just testing out is to select ‘HaLow Wi-Fi devices will get an IP on this device’s local network’. Then your Extender, and anything plugged into it, will get a 192.168.12.x IP, and all of them can communicate using these IPs.
Of course, the alternative (better?) way to solve this problem is to connect your HL1 AP to your router if that’s an option.
Dear David and James,
Thank you for your great advice !
I tried to update the firmware automatically, but it seems that I cannot.
I tried to connect two laptops following the user guide as shown in section 5.7 (user guide).
I think I was success until step 3, but at step 4, I have not figured out how to test the connection between two laptops via Halow. I did not find how to do it in section “Exploring HaLow Connectivity”.
I can see the extender in the homepage of access point but I cannot see anything else from the extender side.
Our further goal is using Halow to connect our sensor system in remote area and collect the data from them, send the data to a data centre so that we can control everything and see the data from home with a computer. Therefore, test the connection between two laptops is just the first step.
From what James said, I think I already connect the two laptops via Halow, is that correct?
Best regards,
An
@An_Truong Here is a screenshot from the Home status page of factory default AP where I’ve then chosen the wizard options “Access Point“ for HaLow Mode and “Wi-Fi HaLow devices will get an IP on your existing router’s network.” for Network Mode:
AP
Here is the same screenshot but on the device in extender mode that is connected to the AP:
Extender
You can see by the different firewall “zones” the various interfaces are in why USB-C (aka usblan) connected device on the AP side cannot talk to a USB-C connected device on the extender side. This is because, on the extender side, all interfaces are in the same zone, but on the AP side, the HaLow interface (wlan0) and the wan port are in the same zone.
So, on the AP, devices plugged into the wan port can communicate to devices connected to the HaLow radio (wlan0) and beyond them, but not to devices plugged into lan, usblan (USB-C) or phy0-ap0 (that’s the 2.4GHz Wi-Fi interface). NOTE: the firewall zone names on one HaLowLink has nothing to do with firewall zone names on another HaLowLink. Those names are only locally significant. So, the fact that the zone name with the HaLow radio (wlan0) on the AP is “wlan” is irrelevant to the zone name with the HaLow radio (wlan)) on the extender (zone name “lan”).
On the extender, since every interface is part of the same firewall zone, usblan can talk to devices connected to the HaLow radio (wlan0) and beyond.
Given the above, to accomplish what you want to do, you would need to move the usblan interface to be part of the “wlan” firewall zone on the AP. This is all assuming I am using a DHCP server already on my network somewhere off of the AP’s wan interface.
Now, if you want the HaLowLink AP to be your DHCP server then the factory default setup “should” work for you on that end because the zones look like this:
AP
And for completeness, the factory default wizard selections are:
@An_Truong also, just to be clear, the auto-update only works if your device has a path to the Internet.
Hi David,
Thank you for your information.
Bellowing is from our wizard. May we have a meeting via Team or Zoom?
When the HaLow is connected, my computer switches to the HaLow Wi-Fi network and no longer has internet access. But if I remove Halow, I cannot access 192.168.12.1.
@An_Truong in your original screenshot, you have:
This is wrong. On the wizard page, you have changed it from the default setup. Since you don’t have an existing router plugged in, you should select ‘HaLow Wi-Fi devices will get an IP on this device’s local network’. This will get you back to what 5.7 of the manual suggests.
Once you have done this, all connected devices will get an IP in the same range (192.168.12.x) and can ping each other to check connectivity. If you want to have internet connectivity for these devices, connect the WAN port of your HL1 to your router.
Let me know if you get stuck on any of the steps above.
Once you have completed these steps, if you could show us a screenshot of the homepage as before that would be useful. You should then be able to communicate via TCP/IP between your two computers. The usual way I would share files then would be to use scp, but any mechanism that works over TCP/IP will be fine.
Thank you, James. I followed your advice. I change the home setting to “HaLow Wi-Fi devices will get an IP on this device’s local network”. I connect the WAN port of Halow 1 to my router. I do not think I get the internet.
The goal is to make sure that two computers are connected through Halow. I do not need to transfer the files. Our aim is use Halow for our project, which is smart sensors for IoT. In this project, we want to collect the sensor data from multiple points using Halow.
I just want to have some evidence to show that I successfully connect two PCs using Halow.
I attached the above link for you, which shows some pictures from my Halow homepage.
Could you help me to check everything?
I am more than happy to have a meeting with you via Team or Zoom to save our time.
The screenshots show that your two HaLowLinks (and almost certainly two laptops) are correctly connected.
To properly validate this, you need to run traffic between your two laptops. The simplest way to do this is to do a ping from the laptop connected to the Extender device to the laptop connected to the AP. This will now work regardless of whether you have connected the cable to the WAN port.
Unfortunately, it does not seem like the HL1 is able to get an address from your router, which means that you don’t have internet on the HL1 and it can’t update itself. You can debug this separately by taking the cable rather currently goes router → HL1, and testing it out to see if it works with router → laptop (i.e. check that your laptop can get internet via this cable). Make sure to disable the WiFi on your laptop.
Thank you for your advice.
I got the internet via that cable. Maybe the problem comes from the fact that I am using university’s internet, which require registration to connect.
