Peplink Router?

Steve - AK0M

I am migrating my home network to a Peplink B-One router. Its default settings have pretty much all outgoing traffic blocked. I am not going to enable uPnP but will manually configure it.
It’s considerably more complex than your typical home router.
Does anyone else have one of these in use with remotely accessing your Flex, and could share what all I need to configure including port settings? Port forwarding should be relatively straightforward but are there other settings I need to touch for SmartLink to work? - Steve AK0M

Mike-VA3MW

I answered you on Facebook as well.

I would HIGHLY recommend that if your networking skills are limited that you run with uPNP turned on, at least to test your networking infrastructure and then make sure it works.

UPnP gets a bad reputation mostly from headlines about routers with buggy or outdated implementations, not from anything inherent to the protocol itself. In a properly implemented and patched router, UPnP simply lets devices on the local network request specific port mappings for specific services, the same thing a competent user would do manually in the router's port forwarding page, just automated and scoped to the application that needs it. The real risk cases that show up in security research almost always involve consumer routers running years old firmware with known vulnerabilities in their UPnP stack (like the IGD flaws from a decade ago) or, in some cases, malware already present on a LAN device abusing UPnP to open ports for its own purposes, which is a symptom of an already compromised host rather than a UPnP problem. On a router that gets regular firmware updates, has UPnP scoped properly, and sits behind a network where you're not already running untrusted code, UPnP is functionally similar to manually forwarding ports, just faster and less error prone for things like gaming consoles, VoIP devices, and yes, remote HF radio access. Treating it as categorically dangerous usually reflects outdated advice repeated without reevaluation rather than a current threat model, and the more productive security posture is patching your router promptly and monitoring what's actually listening, not disabling a convenience feature because of its reputation.

SmartLink is a secure TLS connection. And, if you have problems connecting remotely to the radio, a simple reboot of the radio usually repairs the connections to the SmartLink servers and the users clients.

Now, if you are good at networking already and port fowarding, you won't have an issue.

As a reference, I have 4 radios behind a firewall at my remote and have been running them in fully automatic mode since SmartLink came out with uPNP and have found them to be super dependable.

good luck

Alan

I use a PepLink Balance 310 Router and uPnP fore Flex. It just works! Here is a screenshot.

Alan. WA9WUD