BellAtlantic DSL

[jcallen at narsil.com (Jerry Callen)]

Alex Darke wrote:
> 
> Anyone here using Bell's DSL service?

Not me, but a client does.

> 
> I'm curious about getting it to work under linux, so I can return to not
> having windows running, have my in house network, etc, but with the setup
> this morning, it turns out the tech would appear to NOT be fibbing that
> Microsoft's VPN is *required* to connect to their network. (I thought DSL
> was similar to cable, and it the "modem" Was a router...turns out this DSL
> service is indeed similar to a modem, where you "dial in")
> 
> Anyone?

Disclaimer: things change fast in the telecom world. The following was 
true a month or so ago, but who knows?

Bell Atlantic ADSL uses a scheme called "PPPoE" (PPP over Ethernet)
instead of good old DHCP. For naive clients, this makes it behave a
lot like Windows dial-up networking (which presumably most new ADSL
clients already know how to use), but in general it's not as nice as
nice as DHCP (in particular, you lose some bandwidth because each
packet is encapsulated in a wrapper).

This has nothing to do with VPN.

There are PPPoE clients available for Linux. Here's a link to one
of them (I have NOT used this):

	http://www.roaringpenguin.com/pppoe.html

-- Jerry Callen
   jcallen at narsil.com
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