This morning I am working in my home office and the internet goes out. The fiber gateway was cycling, continually rebooting, all the lights flashing.
The worst part was that I realized I had not written down all of the gateway settings, DMZ, DHCP, port forwarding for VPN, etc.
Tech comes out, looks at the gateway, yeah, it's messed up. Brings in a different model (with no wifi because I shut that off anyway), but can't get it working consistently. Goes back to his truck, gets another model of the one I have. I'm in the other room. Suddenly everything is fine, no issues at all. Check all services, everything looks great. Thanks, have a great day.
Now that he is gone, I log into the gateway (I have a full on Ubiquiti network connected to the gateway) and I need to update the gateway to handle all of my particular network needs.
All of my settings are there. Including the port forwarding and DMZ. VPN is flawless. Knowing how kludgy the fiber gateway is and how chunky the UI is for it, I have 0% confidence that he was able to save my settings and reinstall them on the new one. I tried plugging a laptop directly into the gateway before he was there but could not get a stable connection to get the settings. And this ISP is very far from being technically savvy.
My guess is that the problem was the AC adapter, and he just stuck the old gateway back in. What are the odds of this? Just wondering as I am skipping out of town in a week and don't want to leave my wife with a mess if the internet goes out.
The ONT will assign one IP to the first device that connects. Every other device will look for a DHCP server to get an IP and the ONT will not allow them to get an IP.
You will have one device with and IP and everything else will be stuck.
This is why you have a router. A router has a front end to accept that one IP address and then use its own internal DHCP to allow everything else to access the internet, THROUGH the router. It is a one to many situation. A switch does not have this capability.