Alternatives to PPPOA?
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It is based on this http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/pppoa.html.
While you speak about atm stack, if you need that you need even place a ATM card in pfSense which most people do not do since you need to find a supported card and not many people do that. VPI, VCI and a whole lot of other parameters you can configure for pppoa can be done on the modem.
I used the 2 parts of those tutorials obn FreeBSD but after some pain kept the USB configuration since it does not have another device to be monitored that can go wrong and it seemed that the pppoa modem to be used with mpd was a crap one and the directly connected usb modem was more reliable(though it needed a lot of hacking back than on FreeBSD 5.[4,5]-RELEASE till FreeBSD 6-CURRENT at the time).
It is limited to devices/routers that need this special pptp connection between them. For the others the standard connection would work.
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And Bruce explains it better than me the limitation that PPPoA has in order to be used on normal pc
http://unix.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/FreeBSD/net/2007-10/msg00241.htmlBe aware, that i do not think that many people would have a PCI adsl card at home and will mess around with the setting up of it.
As i said you need to have patience and knowledge of what you are doing to set it up right. -
@ermal:
It is based on this http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/pppoa.html.
I'd regard the hardware mentioned there as barely worth supporting now. That handbook chapter represents the position as it was several years ago - its age is clear by the reference to Alcatel Speedtouch rather than Thomson Speedtouch (as it has been for some time).
The Speedtouch Home could be configured to terminate the PPPoA connection and offered the connection onwards as PPTP (rather than the PPPoE that 3Com chose in their long obsolete router that I mentioned in my original post). The Speedtouch Home is long discontinued, replaced by hardware that supports ADSL 2+. It was old even amongst the 'original ADSL only' Speedtouch products.
The nearest equivalent to the Speedtouch Home these days is the Speedtouch 546 v6. As this hardware is so cheap, I may well pick one up to experiment with; I need to order some GBICs and I could always add it to the order.
It appears that Thomson refer to this PPPoA to PPTP connection as "Relayed PPPoA" - see here for configuration details for the business Speedtouch routers. Google also suggests that a Relayed PPPoA configuration profile is available for the Speedtouch 546 v6, but I can't confirm it.
Certainly adding the option to terminate such a connection on pfSense makes sense - but maybe it should appear as "Relayed PPPoA (Speedtouch routers)" or similar in the GUI.
I would regard the USB modem as utterly obsolete - the price of basic Ethernet ADSL devices is so low that USB devices have disappeared from the market. PCI ADSL cards have disappeared for pretty much the same reasons.
I was talking about an ATM stack in the context of a PCI ADSL card, whilst commenting that the ATM stack in FreeBSD may not have the interest it once did as ATM networking in general is becoming less common. It's rare to come across an ATM NICs these days. For all the hope of ATM, it's increasingly being replaced by other technologies that have lesser overheads such as MPLS.
Please don't think I'm trying to start an "I'm right, you're wrong" sort of argument here. My interest is in setting out the options as clearly as possible, and in talking about and supporting DSL hardware that's available today.
It seems that the options for ADSL delivered using PPPoA are:
"Half Bridge" and similar techniques such as the one mentioned in the the post from Bruce that Ermal mentioned (isn't the 'one up' IP address via DHCP that Bruce mentions what D-Link calls zipb?). This is suitable for single IP address PPPoA accounts. Netgear DM111P might be a suitable ADSL 2+ modem. Configure pfSense for DHCP on the WAN side - or if the (often very short) DHCP lease time is an issue, use DHCP to figure out the details then configure pfSense to the static IP - assuming that your WAN IP is static.
Use an ADSL router with NAT and the firewall disabled. This needs a routed IP account, and uses one IP address from your pool of public addresses. ZyXEL P660H series are suitable ADSL 2+ routers. (If you have another flavour of DSL, such as SDSL or VDSL, the chances are that the corresponding ZyXEL Prestige router will work, though I can't guarantee it). Configure the router and pfSense as I mentioned in my original post.
Speedtouch "Relayed PPPoA" with your pfSense patch, Ermal. Speedtouch 546 v6 might be a suitable ADSL 2+ router. Configure pfSense as Ermal describes.
Any ADSL router you choose with one LAN IP address set as the DMZ address with all ports open to that address (or just turn the router's firewall off). This will work for single IP address PPPoA accounts, but you can get problems from this being 'double NAT' - also it's possible to exhaust the state table on the router. Configure pfSense to the IP address you set up in the router's DMZ feature. I would regard this as a less than ideal approach, but if it's the only one open to you, go for it!
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Hi all,
I'm in the same boat - set up a pfsense/route-modem configuration using PPPoE at home, and spent hours trying to work out why it didn't work when I installed it at work. Turns out the work line only supports PPPoA, whereas my home line supports both (but advocates PPPoA).
Anyway…. after this week I've already forgotten far more about modems, encapsulation methods, DSLAMs, pure/half/RFC1483-bridge modes, double-NAT than I ever wanted to... argh :o
But I may have found a solution. It does involve throwing money at the problem, but at this point if it saves what remains of my hair....
http://www.draytek.co.uk/products/vigor110.html
I'm in no way affiliated, and make no claim as to the suitability of this device to solve any problems you may or may not have! But it does claim to specifically fix our PPPoA woes. Might be worth a punt?
Hope this helps.
sim
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After 3 days of messing around with various ways to work around the problem of pfSense not being able to work with a PPPoA QWest ADSL line I hunted down the tech support for DrayTek in the US and talked to the guy about the Vigor 110.
It really sounds like the right device. It is an ADSL modem and PPPoE/PPPoA bridge. It lets the ethernet device (my pfSense WAN interface in this case) pass authentication information to it in PPPoE and it re-encapsulates the information in PPPoA and sends it up to the DSLAM. From then on the ethernet device is directly bridged to the ADSL line and gets the public IP address by DHCP.
The problem now is that the one place I found in the U.S. that sells them wants a minimum order of 1000 pieces. About 999 more than I have a need for right now. Has anyone found a U.S. source for these?
Thanks, Bill