Category: 
So this weekend I switched out my internet connection at my house from Comcast to Qwest DSL.
a) it was cheaper
b) i’m getting twice the speed up & down as i was with comcast
c) i wasn’t really diggin the phone service over comcast… *shrug*
So anyway… I’m running a FreeBSD firewall here at the house that’s handling some network address translation and firewall stuff (natd & ipfw) so that I can have my sbs server listen for all the mail transfered from my primary server at the co-location facility as well as linking in my pda phone to my exchange server here… enough with the details…
After a long weekend of fighting with the configuration on this thing and finding that there were no resources on the internet, I dug in and got it working on my own. To remedy this for anyone else who may be running a similar setup here’s the solution:
DSL modem being used: ActionTec M1000
FreeBSD version: 6.3
First and formost, get your PPPoE login information from Qwest. This is your username and password you would use to manually activate your modem and set it up without using the disc. It entails the usual going to http://192.168.0.1 and going through the usual screens and such. Get this all done and make sure your modem syncs up and is online before doing ANYTHING below. Otherwise you’ll be banging your head into the wall.
Assuming you’ve done that, head on back out to the modem mangement page (http://192.168.0.1) and select the Advanced setup. On the left-hand side you will see a series of menus. Click the following sequence.
a) WAN IP Address
b) On the screen that appears on the right, select ‘RFC 1483 Transparent Bridging’
c) Click ‘Save’
That’s it, the modem is set. Now it should disconnect you from the internet and the Internet light will disappear on the modem and you’ll be left with just Ethernet, DSL and Power. Now plug your FreeBSD external NIC into the DSL modem and complete the following:
a) edit the file /etc/ppp/ppp.conf and add in the following lines. Comment out everything except what is listed below for the ‘default’ field:
default:
set log Phase tun command
qwestdsl: set device PPPoE:fxp0
set authname username@qwest.net
set authkey password
set dial
set login
add default HISADDR
b) edit the file /etc/rc.conf and add in the following lines:
# QWEST DSL
ppp_enable=”YES”
ppp_mode=”ddial”
ppp_profile=”qwestdsl”
c) make changes to your existing natd.conf file, wherever it may be. 
You will have to change the interface line from whatever external interface you were using (rl0,fxp0,xl0,etc) to tun0. The reason is that ppp creates a tun interface (tun0 first, tun1 second, etc) in order to bind the public ip address to an internal interface. Wierd, but this is what it does.
d) make changes to your existing rc.firewall script or whatever script you’re calling for use with ipfw. Any instance of your previous external interface (just like in natd.conf) should be replaced with tun0.
That should do it. Reboot your system and you should be up and running. If you have any issues, take a good look at your ‘ ifconfig -a ‘ and make sure a tun0 is present and assigned an address. If you need to do further troubleshooting, take a look at /var/log/ppp.log.
For more information on natd, take a look here:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/network-natd.html
For more information on ipfw, take a look here:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/firewalls-ipfw.html
Fore more information on pppoE, take a look here:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/pppoe.html
If you have issues, leave a comment and I’ll make up for whatever I may have missed… this is just a quick blurb to drop down the basics of how to do this. I assume it could be used for any provider which utilizes the M1000 modem or similar setups so use this information at your own risk.
Possibly related:
You must be logged in to post a comment.