Whirlpool

Hey,
anyone out there doing this as well.
I got the thing working but I had to set the ethernet interface manually on the FreeBSD box as the Web Excel ADSL modem/router doesn't hand out the correct IP settings for the connection to work.
I was wondering if anyone else had similar experiences with this setup and what their modem settings were/are.
cheers,
dave.

Check out the Half-Bridge page on my site webexcel.no-ip.com and it has instructions to properly set up a billion modem which is an almost identical modem.

I am running full bridge to an IPCop box ATM and I followed the instructions on my Full Bridge page (for the billion also) and it works fine.

Try it and see, you have nothing to lose.

Hiya,

I am having problems with the half-bridge mode and the WebExcel.

My modem is giving out the right IP address via DHCP to my FreeBSD box, but I keep getting the following errors in /var/log/messages:

Dec 19 02:28:57 endor /kernel: arpresolve: can't allocate llinfo for A.B.C.Drt
Dec 19 02:29:09 endor /kernel: arplookup A.B.C.D failed: host is not on local network

where I've replaced my real IP address by `A.B.C.D`.

Any ideas? Did you have to set up custom routing tables into your modem?

My modem has internal IP address 192.168.1.1, whereas my FreeBSD box has two NICs: one connected to the WebExcel, the other with IP address 192.168.0.1.

John.

i find it sometimes best to use full bridge with the webexcels. the half bridge is a bit dodgy with linux at least.

Hiya,

Unfortunately my ISP (Swiftel) doesn't support full bridge mode.

The best that I could find on-line is that someone was saying that the machine's IP stack is getting confused about having the default route being itself (although MS-Windows seems to be fine with this concept).

I'll try setting the default route manually and let you know how it goes... hope that will solve my problem. There's no real need for me to use DHCP anyhow, as Swiftel gives us static IP addresses.

John.

Hiya,

Here's what I had to do to get it working:

1. Add an alias to my external LAN interface: `ifconfig rl0 alias 172.16.0.2 netmask 0xffffff00`, where 172.16.0.1 is the IP address of my WebExcel modem.
2. Delete the default route which is my ISP supplied public IP address: `route delete default`
3. Add a new default route which is my WebExcel modem: `route add default 172.16.0.1`

(Note: my external iterface rl0 already had the IP address of my ISP supplied public IP address; obtained from the WebExcel modem via DHCP when it was in half-bridge mode.)

Any ideas how I might make this a bit more elegant? Especially, how do I set it up so that it survives a reboot? I'm not quite sure what options to put in `/etc/rc.conf`...

Any help is appreciated,
John.

jpap writes...

Unfortunately my ISP (Swiftel) doesn't support full bridge mode.

i am with swiftel and i use full bridge mode without any problems.

Likewise.

jpap writes...

Unfortunately my ISP (Swiftel) doesn't support full bridge mode.

Your ISP doesnt need to support full bridge mode as they really wont know about. I run an nb1300 in full bridge mode and do all authentication on my FreeBSD box with ppp.

Matt.

Matty5700 writes...

Your ISP doesnt need to support full bridge mode as they really wont know about.

correct. all they see is authentication attempts.

I run an nb1300 in full bridge mode and do all authentication on my FreeBSD box with ppp.


same - except for a 711CE in full bridged mode - and have had 0 dropouts and 0 outages that can be linked to my server :)

Even half bridged (or any modem authentication method for that matter) leads to trouble. I also prefer to use CHAP auth - which is difficult with some modems.

Hiya,

OK -- sorry, I must have my terminology incorrect. I thought that `full bridge` was when there was no PPP link required with no authentication (PAP/CHAP). See this Swiftel forum that gave me that impression... I don't have a clue how such a scheme would actually work on the wire.

In any case, I am happier with my half-bridge mode working as I am using PPPoA which apparently has less overhead than PPPoE -- the end result being that I should be able to achieve faster rates. AFAIK, you can only (currently?) use PPPoE in the full-bridge connections that you are talking about.

My very basic WebExcel PT-3808 modem can handle CHAP with ease... so there are no problems there either.

Besides, why have extra CPU overhead for the PPP link on your box when the modem can do all the encapsulation in hardware? My modem seems v v v stable once the connection is up. I haven't yet experienced an outage, so I can't say what happens when it needs to re-connect.

Getting back to my last post; I couldn't figure out how to solve the problem without an IP address alias on my external interface. Here's what goes in /etc/rc.conf for the setup to survive a reboot:

ifconfig_rl0="inet [IP_ADDR] netmask 255.255.255.0"
ifconfig_rl0_alias0="inet 172.16.0.2 netmask 255.255.255.0"
defaultrouter="172.16.0.1"

where [IP_ADDR] is the static IP assigned by my ISP and 172.16.0.1 is the IP address assigned to the DSL modem.

Hope this helps other FreeBSD users,
John.

This hack is no-longer required, if you update your firmware to REL9P. Once you're running the latest firmware, you can simply use DHCP to obtain the real ISP assigned IP address from the modem and avoid any nasty ARP problems.

What the modem will do is assign the default gateway to be your IP address +1, which the modem will re-route to the half-bridge PPP connection. A bit crude, but it works. (Who knows what happens if you really do want to connect to a host with that IP address!)

However, I've found that my connection becomes unstable -- the DHCP lease time is only about 60 seconds; whenever FreeBSD updates the interface IP address settings, I get dropped packets and increased latency. My solution is to negotiate the IP address settings via DHCP then kill off the client.

Enjoy,
John.