[Soekris] Soekris-tech Digest, Vol 57, Issue 3

[Andrew Gordon]

> From: andyk365 <andy at oem-router-solutions.co.uk>
> Subject: Re: [Soekris] PCI ADSL modem.
>
> We supply the ADSL2+ card you're talking about in the UK now. It presents as
> a realtek ethernet NIC and as far as we are aware works well with xBSD.
>
> You can check it out at  http://www.oem-router-solutions.co.uk
> http://www.oem-router-solutions.co.uk  - if you have any questions you need
> answered reply to this post or you can emailus directly at
> support at oem-router-solutions.co.uk

Presenting as an ethernet NIC does neatly solve the OS compatibility 
issue, but unfortunately it also defeats my main reason for wanting an 
internal card in the first place!

My main objection to external routers is that they swallow up the one IP 
address that you get with an ADSL line, so you then have to play games 
with complex NAT/port-forwarding setup on the router to run any services 
on a host behind it.  This is tedious to set up and worse still to 
maintain (ever found yourself wanting to set up a new service back at base 
when logged in from 1000s of miles away?), and still doesn't work properly 
for some applications.

Some routers (and maybe your device??) do give a way round this: they will 
map PPPoA on the ADSL line to PPPoE on the ethernet side, allowing the 
connection from the ISP to be terminated at the host, assigning the public 
IP address directly to the host PC, like a traditional modem connection. 
However, most routers don't do this, and those that do rarely make it 
clear in their documentation: they all claim to do PPPoA and PPPoE, but 
what they usually mean is that they can do one or the other of these on 
the ADSL line (by PPPoE they mean PPPoE over an RFC1483 bridged link), and 
not the configuration I want where there is PPPoE on the _local_ ethernet 
piped to PPPoA on the ADSL side.   The only ones I have found so far are 
the AVM "Fritz!" range, and also Alcatel/Thomson devices that can do a
similar trick with the rather less satisfactory Microsoft PPTP instead of 
PPPoE.

I'm aware that this problem doesn't apply in places where direct PPPoE 
connections are widely available: here in the UK, 99% of ISP connections 
are PPPoA only.