Altibox fiber — straight into Mikrotik CCR1009 :: Cavelab blog

This post is part of the Home network v2 series.

Ever since I got the fiber installed last year, the plan has been to drop the ISP box and plug it straight into my router. That’s why I had the fiber terminated in my patch panel.

I’ve been reluctant to do it, since messing with the internet needs to be done while the rest of the house is sleeping. And I was unsure what SFP module to use. I did buy the Ubiquiti UF-SM-1G-S pair, planning to use it with my EdgeRouter.

But I ended up using the SFP module that came with the ISP box, and my new MikroTik CCR1009.

The swap was super easy and only took a few minutes 😃

Table of contents

SFP module

This is the SFP module that came with the Altibox VMG8825-B60C router/home central, it worked perfectly in the CCR 🙂

Vendor: Tsuhan
Part no.: THMPRS-3511-10A
Connector type: SC
Wavelength: Tx 1310 nm / Rx 1550 nm

Glorious blinkenlight

Fiber patch

I have a 1 meter fiber patch cable between the patch panel and the SFP module — with the following specifications:

SC to SC (UPC)
Single mode 9/125
OS2
Simplex
Outer diameter 2.0mm
LSZH (low smoke zero halogen)

CCR configuration changes

We need to make a few configuration changes on the CCR:

Change MAC address on the WAN interface
Create a VLAN on the WAN interface
Change the DHCP client interface
Update firewall and NAT rules

The combo1 interface is a combined SFP and Ethernet interface. It needs to have combo mode auto or sfp, and we can no longer use the Ethernet port.

MAC address

First we need to change the MAC address on our combo1 interface. This can not be done from WinBox, but is easy in the terminal:

/interface ethernet
set combo1 mac-address=xxxxxxxxxxxx

It will probably work without changing the MAC address, but I’ve heard people having problems retaining their static IP. Which might be explained by Altibox thinking the router is offline.

If you need to reset the MAC address, here is the command for that:

/interface ethernet
reset-mac-address combo1

VLAN

Next we need to create VLAN 102 on the combo1 interface:

/interface vlan
add interface=combo1 name=altibox_wan vlan-id=102

Altibox uses VLAN 101 for IPTV and 102 for internet.

DHCP client

And change the interface on our DHCP client, from combo1 to altibox_wan:

/ip dhcp-client
edit number=0 value-name=interface

Firewall and NAT

Last, but not least, we need to update all the firewall and NAT rules. Replacing combo1 with altibox_wan, wherever present.

You can use interface lists in the rules instead of the actual interfaces.

Winning!

And that’s it, I got my static IP back within a few seconds after changing the DHCP client interface. And it’s been working great since 🙂

So nice to remove the Altibox home central, it doesn’t really have that homelab look and feel 😛

Last commit 2024-04-05, with message: Tag cleanup.