PPPoE Radio Broadband

[Bingo]

Hi,

I have searched the wiki and forums and found nothing that has helped thus far. I am a fairly experienced network admin (could get myself into trouble saying that...) and have a broadband connection over radio that uses PPPoE.

I had originally used monowall which handled the pppoe auth and worked fine. I then found UT and setup a box running the 5.x versions with no probelms at all until one day UT had auto upgraded to v6.x and it would no longer connect to pppoe. I also found after this upgrade the hardware was lacking so tried two more sets of newer hardware with no joy.
By this time the missus wasn't too happy with no internet for a few days so I reverted to pfsense (a few more features than mono) and have been running on that until now when I found there was a version 7 (and time has FINALLY permitted). So I download v7.1 and configure UT in router mode (as I had in 5.x), configured the interfaces and STILL the same cannot connect to PPPoE problem!!!

Now I have read PPPoE can be 'flaky' on UT, but I REALLY want use UT if I can. I do not have any small router device (Apart from my pf box) to connect to PPPoE, everything here in New Zealand is PPPoA, and the ISP will charge me about $130 for a small router, which then I still want to run UT (though i would rather just use pfsense than go that route)

Is there any further help, testing, etc someone can give me?

Many thanks
Tim

[mdh]

If you're using Untangle in router mode, you can sometimes adjust the MTU on the external interface to fix issues with PPPoE. That's not guaranteed, but its worth a try. It is set for 1500 by default. Try dropping it down to 1492, then 1482, 1472, but don't go any lower than 1452. It might be worth checking with your ISP for the MTU that they use.

[Bingo]

Hi MDH,

Wherabouts can I do this? I can only find it if I set external to Static, unless of course you mean the PPPoE Optional Parameters. If so would it be a line with mtu=xxxx?

Cheers

[mdh]

Well, poop! It looks like this has changed since the last time I had to mess with it (which has been a few revs ago). Per the wiki, its not available as something that can be modified with PPPoE. Sorry to get your hopes up. Maybe sky-knight will read this thread and have some ideas.

[SMR]

So... you're saying pfsense works well with the PPPoE problem? I do apologize if I'm missing something here... but can't you just have your pfsense be the router and run Untangle in bridge mode?

Internet -- Modem -- pfsense -- Untangle(bridged) -- Internal network.

Again, sorry if I'm missing something really simple, which I'm sure I am because I figure you would have already considered this.

[sky-knight]

I don't know much about PPPoE myself... I don't use it and I recommend you get the DSL modem to do it if possible. The problem is the implementation details of PPP. It's too darn custom to the telco to make any PPPoE system truly generic. Because of this, only the telco supported equipment will likely work.

[Bingo]

Sorry about the late reply guys - life....

SMR: I COULD use the pfsense box in front of untangle but I do not want another box on my network (somewhat) unnecessarily. I know this is a generic pleb statement but 'if pfsense works why doesn't UT'. So far it sounds like bsd has a slightly better implementation than linux.

Skynight: I could purchase a little black box to handle the pppoe, but ones that do this in NZ are not common, ie expensive.

The REALLY annoying part of all this for me is that it DID work in UT v5.x but has not ever since.

Thanks you all for your info and maybe something may happen one day so this works again.