Does TNSR support PPPOE client and UPNP service ?

[rcoleman-netgate]

@insmod said in Does TNSR support PPPOE client and UPNP service ?:

TNSR support pppoe clinet

I can confirm it does not - I would like to run TNSR on the edge in my home but cannot because of this.

[insmod]

@rcoleman-netgate I need pppoe and upnp in my home network,what a pity.

[insmod]

@rcoleman-netgate
I'm not sure whether it can works for a pppoe client using vpp command.
I get the result from chatGPT :(

create pppoe-session interface eth0
set pppoe client-interface ppp0 username myusername password mypassword
set interface ip address ppp0 192.168.1.1/24
pppoe enable session ppp0

[rcoleman-netgate]

@insmod ChatGPT is not a trustworthy source of information in general so take anything you glean from it with many million grains of salt.

[dx]

PPPoE is implemented as a plugin in vpp, but I'm not sure how much work is still needed to make pppoe client work which is widely used in home broadband.

[rcoleman-netgate]

@dx said in Does TNSR support PPPOE client and UPNP service ?:

widely used in home broadband.

In the US the only carrier I know of that uses this is Quantum Fiber née Lumen Technologies née CenturyLink.

[RobbieTT]

@rcoleman-netgate
PPPoE is pretty common in Europe though, which is a reasonably large market!

️

[blunden]

@RobbieTT said in Does TNSR support PPPOE client and UPNP service ?:

@rcoleman-netgate
PPPoE is pretty common in Europe though, which is a reasonably large market!

️

"Pretty common" is probably a bit of an exaggeration, but it's common in a few countries, yes. Most of the EU residential ISPs doesn't use it though, as far as I know. That obviously still means that support should be added eventually, especially if VPP already officially supports the feature. I actually created a thread asking about how the process of adding feature to TNSR works in cases where the feature is already officially supported in VPP, just to get a feel for the amount of extra work required. No responses so far though.

Other basic features like DHCPv6 PD and Hairpin NAT don't work either yet, despite official support in VPP for years. Both of those as well as PPPoE might be more important for residential users though, and TNSR is probably more focused on corporate users at this time. Still, the fact that Netgate sell their own router appliances to regular customers mean that a bunch of residentual users will end up running TNSR too, so their needs also matter now.

[Bob.Dig]

@blunden Here, Cable is not using it, *DSL is using it and with that, the same ISPs providing DSL will use it even for their Fiber.

[RobbieTT]

@blunden
Why an exaggeration? There is no single internet provider in the US as large as the entirety of the UK, which has a state-regulated monopoly providing the bulk of fixed-line broadband and the infrastructure behind it. It uses PPPoE for residential and smaller-bandwidth business broadband via the plethora of ISPs delivering connectivity.

It is true that the US is over 4x more populous than the UK but the UK is not the only country in Europe and PPPoE is not constrained to the UK alone; or just Europe for that matter.

I dislike high-bandwidth PPPoE connections as much as the next guy but to deny its relevance is rather narrow-minded.

️

[blunden]

@Bob-Dig said in Does TNSR support PPPOE client and UPNP service ?:

@blunden Here, Cable is not using it, *DSL is using it and with that, the same ISPs providing DSL will use it even for their Fiber.

I see. That certainly isn't the case here and not in any neighboring country where I happen to know people. That ISPs that have built their customer facing infrastructure around PPPoE continues to use it isn't that surprising, I guess.

Where is "here" btw?

@RobbieTT said in Does TNSR support PPPOE client and UPNP service ?:

@blunden
Why an exaggeration? There is no single internet provider in the US as large as the entirety of the UK, which has a state-regulated monopoly providing the bulk of fixed-line broadband and the infrastructure behind it. It uses PPPoE for residential and smaller-bandwidth business broadband via the plethora of ISPs delivering connectivity.

It is true that the US is over 4x more populous than the UK but the UK is not the only country in Europe and PPPoE is not constrained to the UK alone; or just Europe for that matter.

I dislike high-bandwidth PPPoE connections as much as the next guy but to deny its relevance is rather narrow-minded.

️

Fair point about the size of the UK Openreach in terms of total subscribers compared to single US ISPs.

I know that it's common in the UK and a few other countries, but my understanding is that ISPs in most EU countries generally don't use it. I guess I interpreted "common in the EU" to mean "lots of ISPs in many EU countries use it". Based on the total number of subscribers, I suppose it might be somewhat common though.

I didn't deny it's relevance or that it shouldn't be implemented, I just pointed out that there is some fairly basic functionality that likely affects an even larger number of residential customers that haven't been added either, despite VPP support existing for 5 years now. In other words, I downplayed its relevance a little bit but still said that features (such as PPPoE and the others I mentioned) needed by residential customers should get some attention now too, since the fact that they sell router hardware with TNSR preinstalled to regular consumers now mean that the number of licensed TNSR instances used in a residential context is likely to grow. After all, multiple countries now offer broadband services where PfSense is simply far too slow, so I imagine interest in TNSR to grow in this sector.

If TNSR had been open source, I'm sure someone would've implemented all of these features already. I understand that open sourcing it probably wouldn't work with the intended licensing model and enterprise focus though.

[jwt]

@blunden said in Does TNSR support PPPOE client and UPNP service ?:

@Bob-Dig said in Does TNSR support PPPOE client and UPNP service ?:

@blunden Here, Cable is not using it, *DSL is using it and with that, the same ISPs providing DSL will use it even for their Fiber.

I see. That certainly isn't the case here and not in any neighboring country where I happen to know people. That ISPs that have built their customer facing infrastructure around PPPoE continues to use it isn't that surprising, I guess.

Where is "here" btw?

@RobbieTT said in Does TNSR support PPPOE client and UPNP service ?:

@blunden
Why an exaggeration? There is no single internet provider in the US as large as the entirety of the UK, which has a state-regulated monopoly providing the bulk of fixed-line broadband and the infrastructure behind it. It uses PPPoE for residential and smaller-bandwidth business broadband via the plethora of ISPs delivering connectivity.

It is true that the US is over 4x more populous than the UK but the UK is not the only country in Europe and PPPoE is not constrained to the UK alone; or just Europe for that matter.

I dislike high-bandwidth PPPoE connections as much as the next guy but to deny its relevance is rather narrow-minded.

️

Fair point about the size of the UK Openreach in terms of total subscribers compared to single US ISPs.

I know that it's common in the UK and a few other countries, but my understanding is that ISPs in most EU countries generally don't use it. I guess I interpreted "common in the EU" to mean "lots of ISPs in many EU countries use it". Based on the total number of subscribers, I suppose it might be somewhat common though.

I didn't deny it's relevance or that it shouldn't be implemented, I just pointed out that there is some fairly basic functionality that likely affects an even larger number of residential customers that haven't been added either, despite VPP support existing for 5 years now. In other words, I downplayed its relevance a little bit but still said that features (such as PPPoE and the others I mentioned) needed by residential customers should get some attention now too, since the fact that they sell router hardware with TNSR preinstalled to regular consumers now mean that the number of licensed TNSR instances used in a residential context is likely to grow. After all, multiple countries now offer broadband services where PfSense is simply far too slow, so I imagine interest in TNSR to grow in this sector.

If TNSR had been open source, I'm sure someone would've implemented all of these features already. I understand that open sourcing it probably wouldn't work with the intended licensing model and enterprise focus though.

the current (and then) VPP PPPoE plugin implements the data plane of a pppoe server, such as a vBRAS.
It needs to be integrated with a control plane, such as Open BRAS https://github.com/wfnex/openbras to be functional.

It can not be used as a pppoe client.

Despite, as you suggest, all of that code being open source, no good pppoe client exists for VPP today. VPP is great, but it’s a challenging programming environment, and not everyone has the chops.

Netgate is the #3 contributor to VPP (by company), behind only Cisco and Intel (and not very far behind Intel.). These companies both dwarf Netgate in size and budgets.

Of note: we have recently developed a new pppoe stack for FreeBSD (and thus pfsense) which avoids using netgraph. It is netgraph which is causing the poor performance, and the single-threading. I’d expect that code to make its way to a pfsense release in the next six months.

I also expect to be able to leverage that code (which we control the copyright to) to be able to implement a VPP based pppoe client for Netgate products.

UPnP is easy once you have a good packet filter implemented, you just make the right API calls. This said, VPP’s ACLs are not what you want for a pfsense-like experience, and VPP’s NAT leaves a lot to be desired (ask us how we know)

These are why we’ve ported npf to VPP. This should appear in TNSR 24.10.

[blunden]

@jwt Thank you for providing some additional background and context. I had not looked much into the PPPoE code since I don't personally need it.

Now that there is no longer and Homelab license, TNSR isn't really feasible for me anymore, but I still enjoy seeing VPP being more and more fleshed out feature wise.

[RobbieTT]

@jwt said in Does TNSR support PPPOE client and UPNP service ?:

Of note: we have recently developed a new pppoe stack for FreeBSD (and thus pfsense) which avoids using netgraph. It is netgraph which is causing the poor performance, and the single-threading. I’d expect that code to make its way to a pfsense release in the next six months.

I also expect to be able to leverage that code (which we control the copyright to) to be able to implement a VPP based pppoe client for Netgate products.

This is extraordinary good news and somewhat buried in this thread. Happy to run tests on one of my routers when you need feedback.