GL-X300B (Collie) 4G LTE VPN Industrial Wireless Gateway, External Full-Band 4G Antennas, Hardware Watchdog, at Command, DNS Encryption, 2.4GHz ONLY (RS485)

It was easier than I expected to get this working. I just put the sim card in, connected on the LAN network following the directions, and in no time it was working. It has a lot of features that I'm not using, but it does what I need perfectly.

This is a good, heavy duty wireless gateway. It came with OpenWRT firmware, and pre-installed with OpenVPN. You can also use many other VPNs, the chances are good the one you like is included. So while there was some work getting this set up, it was pretty straightforward, and began to work smoothly vs more complicated gateways or niche firmware. This is working solidly, it doesn't seem like the fastest, but for reliability, it's working well and you want that for heavy duty use. For commercial or industrial use, this seems like it would work fine. As for the gateway itself, it seems solid and doesn't overheat much, so should hold up to long use.

Setup was super easy, really just put in my SIM, plug in the power, and answer some questions. Going through the different menu options was pretty intuitive.It doesn't have the fall back function I was looking for. I wanted this to be on my home network, and only switch to LTE if my cable went down. It only has that function if you hook it up between your cable modem and the rest of your network. For some cases that might be fine, but I don't want to replace my high end router with this less expensive lower powered option.Also, the hardware watchdog appears to only be for the device itself. I was hoping I could connect it to another device and have the watchdog

Update: Looks like this thing, on GPS-enabled models, phones home GPS data. This COULD be for a cloud offering/service related to Goodcloud - gps-telemetry.goodcloud.xyz is the destination domain for the phonehome. They also use an MQTT provider for some other telemetry data from the device.I'm inclined to think it's basic telemetry you opt into, and a service they provide, but... Just something to be aware of.Rest of review pre-update follows:The shipped firmware is:OpenWrt 19.07.8, r11364-ef56c85848I like that it's OpenWRT - That gives it a ton of possible features, and known reliability. Unfortunately that shipped version is pretty old, released August 7th, 2021. There's a pending update that bumps it up to... Well... 19.07.8. It looks like the firmware update fixes an internal regression with SMTP services. I haven't applied it yet as I write this.The SSH daemon is Dropbear v2019.78. There's a couple not-great CVEs for this, but no 9.8s or anything.SSH is enabled by default. You define the root password on first login to the webui, and you use root and that password to login. Not idea, but... OK.There's a single default password for the wireless network (goodlife), this is pretty bad. There's also no prompt to change it on first UI login.The cellular side of this seems to work as advertised. I'm using a 5G/4G prepaid data SIM that I'm also reviewing. Upload and download performance is what I'd categorize as "pretty much not the worst" - It does what it's supposed to.There's an option for forwarding SMSes, which is also nice.The UI exposes the serial connection to the cellular modem, so you can send your own AT commands if you want to. There's some predefined ones, and an input field. I've tested a few cellular bridges and routers, and none that I know of have exposed this. Very nice to see.The CPU is:system type : Qualcomm Atheros QCA9533 ver 2 rev 0cpu model : MIPS 24Kc V7.4It has 128MB RAM:root@GL-X300B:/tmp# cat /proc/meminfoMemTotal: 123584 kBMemFree: 62808 kBMemAvailable: 57664 kBIf this thing had a USB port, it looks like the firmware still has USB modem tethering enabled./www/cgi-bin/api is a fun looking binary, looks like there's additional API calls you can make that aren't exposed in the UI. I'm not too interested in digging too deep though.The above was captured on the shipping firmware. I then upgraded to the latest. This was compiled a couple years ago still... Well. OK. I THOUGHT I was upgrading to the latest, because I just followed the prompt to upgrade from within the UI. If you look up Collie on the vendor's website (that's the codeword-type name for the device) you'll see a series 4 firmware is now out, and 4.5.17 was released 2024-06-06. This is much better than the impressions I was getting that this was another device that received a token fw update or two...You can go download the image from their site and open it up in 7zip, or a loopback mount, or whatever you'd like.Overall I'm pretty impressed with this thing, and I'm glad I had the opportunity to dig into it. The fixed Wifi password is a bit of a letdown, but times are changing and I don't know for sure when this was manufactured. Hopefully newer releases or newer product lines ship with random passwords per device.I expect that nothing of what I wrote above about the software stands if you move to the 4.x firmware line.

This is a very capable 4G LTE modem paired with wired and wireless interfaces for sharing that connection with any other internet capable device. The GL.iNet brand is well known and trustworthy to me, I've been carrying one of their pocket routers for travel for years.I'm using mine paired with pfSense as the gateway, and Google Fi as the 4G provider, since they provide free data SIMs to phone customers, this makes being a standby device free of charge, and pfsense can automatically cut over if my primary internet connection goes down. So far, it has not, but in tests the cut-over worked well and data speeds were as fast as 4G LTE here can provide.Setup was easy, but then again, I use this stuff for a living. I don't think most people who know what this is will have a problem though. It's based on OpenWRT, so the interface isn't new or unusual.