[ale] Odd network setup w/ iptables NAT routing

[Greg Clifton]

Mike,

If you just need to power cycle the DSL modem, there a number of
manufacturers that offer remotely controller PDU devices (APC, Tripp Lite,
etc.). Many of these are IP addressable now, but I seem to recall that
serial versions are/were available in times past and perhaps even devices
with a modem built in. I take it that you couldn't use an IP addressable
device, since you loose the connection until you cycle the DSL modem? If you
had a managed PDU device with a dial up modem, you could power the DSL modem
down remotely, but no doubt this solution would cost more than a simple
internal modem in the box.

GC

On Wed, Jul 14, 2010 at 10:59 AM, Michael B. Trausch <mike at trausch.us>wrote:

> On Wed, 2010-07-14 at 08:35 -0400, James Sumners wrote:
> > I understood your situation to be that you have two external
> > connections coming into the firewall 24/7. That is, DSL on eth0 and T1
> > on eth1 (or whatever, I've never dealt with a T1).
>
> That would be correct.
>
> > I thought the "manual" part was all done at a keyboard. Now I
> > understand that you have to unplug the DSL connection from the
> > firewall and plug in the T1? If that's the case, well, I don't know
> > what to suggest in regard to the two networks.
> >
> This is also correct.  I'm just not sure that I understand what bridging
> the two interfaces together would accomplish.  Basically, I have the DSL
> attached to eth0, the LAN attached to eth1, and the T1 line attached to
> eth2.  When packets stop going across eth0 (which I can adequately
> determine by using "ping -c4 <default gateway> > /dev/null" and checking
> the status code), I need to trigger a failover to the eth2 device.  Of
> course, I only had the light-bulb moment about checking the default
> gateway late last night... the DSL modem provides the default gateway.
>
> > I assume you're just power cycling the AT&T modem? I'm fairly positive
> > that you will not be able to power cycle that thing remotely. I'd be
> > shocked if AT&T offers anything that useful. You might look into a PCI
> > modem[1]. Then you can remotely take the interface down and bring it
> > back up via your dial-up connection.
>
> To make things more complicated, this is something of a nonstandard
> setup.  I think that if I print out the whole configuration listing on
> the advanced configuration page, I can probably mirror the
> configuration.  What I *don't* know about DSL is if you have to register
> the device on the network before being able to use it.  I know that at
> least with cable modems, you have to have the network provider whitelist
> the hardware address of the modem so that they will talk to it.  Perhaps
> since DSL authentication is done using PPPoE, that is different?  I
> don't know.
>
> I will check into the PCI modem, though, because that would very likely
> solve all of the issues that I have.  I'll just need to figure out
> exactly how they are tunneling the static IP addresses to me; the modem
> picks up a dynamic address over PPPoE and then uses that to gateway the
> static IP addresses.  If everything works out perfectly with this, I
> would be able to use all 6 addresses in the /29 that is allocated to us,
> instead of giving up one for the modem... that would be nice.
>
> Is it too much to expect of any service provider to just work and to
> provide hardware that just works?  I'm beginning to think that it is
> indeed too much of an expectation.
>
>        --- Mike
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20100714/e3b8bbed/attachment.html