[sf-lug] (forw) Re: SF-LUG meeting notes for Monday April 16th 2018

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Bobbie Sellers (bliss-sf4ever at dslextreme.com):

>  The problem was that I had no Internet access and next week I will
> have a Netgear Broadband ADSL2 Plus Modem (DM111PSP-100NAS) which is
> supposed to be nothing but a modem.

Nice unit, assuming (as Daniel points out) you have ADSL2+ service and don't 
need backward-compatibility.  Here's the other one Daniel mentioned,
that does ADSL2: https://www.netgear.com/support/product/dm200.asp

[Siemens SpeedStream 4100:]

> Well, Rick, it has only a port for the filtered phone line and for
> output to the computer or to the Netgear router and Wifi point that John
> S. so generously gave me.

Yes, that matches what I saw when I searched about the unit, yesterday.

> The router software may permit DSL over PPPoE but it is not
> configurable as far as I can see.

How odd!

Are you implying that your DSLExtreme service imposes a requirement to
use PPPoE client software?  Personally, I'd be at some pains to avoid
that constraint, when ISP-shopping.

> Having one problem in that I cannot figure out which how to change
> the "admin" to some other user name.

I think this is explained in Chapter 8 of the manual.
https://www.manualslib.com/manual/152570/Siemens-4100-Series.html?page=41#manual

>     My printer is on Ethernet, so is the test bed Dell E6420 laptop
> (while doing updates) that I usually bring to meetings. If I have the
> energy I may take my Transformer tablet to bed and use the wireless once
> I put the new password into it. And once my roomie figures out how to
> use her new Samsung Galaxy 9 she will likely want to use it for
> entertainment data.

OK, makes sense.  So, like a lot of people, you're going to want a local
LAN using a RFC1918 private IP address netblock reaching out through to
your ADSL modem and across the telco link via a NAT router/gateway of
some sort with DHCP services on the local side.  And maybe you like
having wireless functionality, too.

The easy and lazy-person's way to do that is with a prepackaged little
box like the old WRT54G boxes of yore.  As Daniel knows, I still have
one of those in active service Chez Moen (a model WPT54G v.3), running
an aging installation of OpenWRT.  I actually got two identical ones for
free, many years ago.  The guy running EBLUG begged one of them off me
for dedicated EBLUG meeting use.  Naturally, I checked back a while
later and it had gone off into some individual's house, rather than
being returned to me, but I really didn't expect anything better than
that.  At least I still have the other one.

To just do NAT router/gateway service, you could just employ any Linux
box whatsoever that has two network ports.  It's pretty dead-simple.
Adding a running copy of the ISC DHCP daemon (server) program is
likewise no big deal.  (If PPPoE is required, this is also where you'd
run the Roaring Penguin PPPoE client.)  Adding WAP functionality would
take a bit more doing.  (I would guess Daniel knows all about that.)