[NTLUG:Discuss] Linux, DSL, and Qwest?

[Richard Cobbe]

Afternoon, all.

Has anyone had any success getting Linux to work with Qwest's DSL service?
I'm primarily concerned with their small business system, although I'll
take any pointers.

Here's the situation: I've set up a network for my Dad's small law firm: 5
Windows 95/98 machines around the office, and a RedHat 6.2 server in the
back room.  The RH machine does file-sharing via Samba and provides a
gateway to the network.  To date, the network connectivity has been through
a dialup link, using pppd and diald, plus standard Linux 2.2 ipchains to
handle the masquerading stuff.  So far, it's worked fine, although diald
doesn't always create the default route when it starts :-(.

The firm has recently signed up for Qwest's DSL service.  They've got the
modem hooked up and synced up with the CO, so that's all fine.  I was able
to get the connection up using a Win95 machine, but I haven't been able to
get it running via Linux.

Originally, I'd thought Qwest used PPPoE, so I downloaded rp-pppoe,
installed it, and configured it for their network.  It was never able to
establish the connection to the ISP---timed out waiting for a PPP
initialization message.  (I don't have the logs in front of me, so I don't
remember the exact problem.)

However, when I tried it with the Win95 box, I didn't need to set up
PPPoE.  It was just plug it in, turn on DHCP, and go.

So, I tried that with the Redhat machine.  I used their netcfg utility to
configure eth1 to come up at boot time and use DHCP for address
resolution.  (Eth0 is the internal network, and it has a static IP,
129.168.0.1.)  It doesn't appear that an /etc/pump.conf is necessary, so I
didn't supply one.

Pump never returns.  After about 30 seconds, though, ifconfig shows that it
has assigned an IP address to eth1; it was always 10.0.0.2 when I tried
it.  I set up the routing tables manually to read the following:

Destination     Gateway         Netmask             Interface
192.168.0.1     *               255.255.255.255     eth0
192.168.0.0     *               255.255.255.0       eth0
10.0.0.0        *               255.0.0.0           eth1
127.0.0.0       *               255.0.0.0           lo
default         10.0.0.1        0.0.0.0             eth1

(The gateway IP was supplied by Qwest's tech support, for what that's
worth.)

I tried to ping 10.0.0.1, by IP address, and it printed the error message

>From 10.0.0.2: Destination Host Unreachable

I control-C'd out of ping and went to try some other things, when the
kernel started dumping errors to the console:

eth1: 21140 transmit timed out, status fe67c057, SIA 00000000 00000200
00000000 c40ffec8, resetting...

Any idea what's going on here?  Any ideas as to how to make this work?

Thanks kindly,

Richard