Failover IP address question

Hello and Happy Wednesday! I hope you’re having a great week so far! I also appreciate you taking a moment out of your day to reach out to us on our Community Business Forums! You’ve reached the best place and perfect person to help with virtually all of your account needs! Going forward, the failover second public IP should become presented to the firewall in this scenario however, you might have to consult with your SonicWALL support team to determine if additional DNS settings are needed to convert the new public IP address being presented. Hope this information helps! 

The SonicWALL is set up for Dynamic DNS so it will pick up whatever public IP is presented to it and then should work fine with a failover.

As a related question, and I'm not onsite to check this out, is there a document available that shows how to connect the failover box to the Comcast modem or do I need to schedule a tech visit?  He left the equipment in place but just didn't hook up the failover. 

The tech left the Connection Pro device disconnected, as per my instructions to him.  Is hooking it back up something a user can do or do I need to place a service call?

I'll be onsite in a few days and will check it out.

The Cradlepoint is showing in standby mode which I take to mean that it is installed and activated.  However we had an extended outage a week ago where it didn't kick in so I believe the tech did not make a necessary connection between it and our modem.  I should be onsite next week to see what cable might have been left disconnected but was hoping there was some sort of setup manual I could review.

If I can't figure it out, I'll place a service call.

Not sure if this helps, but we have Connection Pro connected as well. As soon as the Cradlepoint gateway loses the CBR connection, it will active the LTE/4G connection. However, this doesn't transfer to the CBR... you would need to run a cable from the Cradlepoint to the Sonicwall or somehow connect to the Cradlepoint.

What we did in our case is I added a Netgear Access Point to the Cradlepoint. So if CBR goes down, CP gateway kicks in and I have my users connect via the AP WiFi. Since LTE/4G bandwidth is very limited, I only use it for a select group of users who need mission critical connection while CBR is down.

Thanks for the response.  This is for my church which is a small (<5 computer + telephone system) outfit.  Normally I wouldn't worry about having the backup but a couple of weeks ago we had a 12 hour Comcast service interruption and it would have been nice to have it kick in.

I checked the wiring this week and there is a cable from the Cradlepoint to the Comcast modem that I would have thought provided the necessary backup feed but for whatever reason it didn't.

I guess we could run a cable from the Cradlepoint directly to the SonicWALL and let the SonicWALL handle the failover but that doesn't get the phone system back online in a failure.

So at this point I'm going to involve their tech support to find out what needs to be done.

@user_c471a8 I believe this is correct: "I guess we could run a cable from the Cradlepoint directly to the SonicWALL and let the SonicWALL handle the failover"

Your Sonicwall needs to be configured to have a primary connection (Comcast via CBR) and a secondary connection in case the primary fails (Comcast via CradlePoint). If CBR fails, two things will happen: the Cradlepoint will activate its LTE connection, and the Sonicwall will change to the secondary connection. In Sonicwall settings you need to activate the secondary connection, and configure it as secondary. (This assumes you have a Sonicwall that is capable of dual connections.)

In our case I don't have the Cradlepoint into our Sonicwall because the CP cannot provide the necessary bandwidth for our network (school with 700 devices). This is why I have it on "semi-manual" mode... it will activate automatically if CBR fails, but only a handful of users connect to it via WiFi (or ethernet) in case of mission critical necessity.

Right.  I'm quite familiar with setting up failover with SonicWALLs. Have over a dozen in the field with several having dual broadband inputs that will fail over.  But my concern is that having the firewall handle this is too far downstream.  The Comcast equipment needs to handle the failover to the phone system.