This post is unrelated from our house building activities, but I wanted to put it out there as I had trouble tracking down this information myself.  When our satellite internet was provisioned here yesterday, we noticed that it would work when directly connected to my laptop, but wouldn’t work when connected to our router, which is a Netgear WNDR3700.

After a fair amount of searching I was able to determine that the router was operating in NAT mode, and the satellite modem also operates in NAT mode, resulting in some kind of double-NAT configuration which is, I guess, a problem (not a networking expert here.)  It seemed that I needed to be able to put my router into “Bridge mode”, to disable NAT.  Unfortunately there is no way to do this with the Netgear admin software that is loaded on the router.

I searched some more and found that many people recommended installing DD-WRT on the router, which is an open-source router software and sounded like it could solve our problems.  The upgrade was trivial – just grabbed the DD-WRT firmware file for our model of WNDR3700 (it’s a first generation unit), and uploaded it using the Netgear web admin panel.  The upgrade takes a few minutes and after we logged into the DD-WRT software we were easily able to configure it to work with the satellite modem.  Here’s hoping this post helps out someone else one day!