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>> I called AT&T and they say the Westell 6100 modem/router I have will |
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>> not respond to pings. They said I could put it into bridged mode and |
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>> set up PPPoE on the computer connected to it which would cause ICMP |
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>> packets to pass through to the computer. Would you guys recommend |
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>> that? For sure I won't attempt this until I'm in the same room as the |
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>> device. |
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> |
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> You'll lose the router functionality doing that. If you need to connect |
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> other machines to it, then it will only be able to act as a switch, meaning |
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> that everything you connect to it will either need to be on the same subnet, |
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> or you need to configure another machine to act as a router if you need to |
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> connect different subnets. And the machine will also need to be always on |
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> in order to provide internet connectivity to other machines, since it will |
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> be the one that talks to the ADSL modem. |
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> |
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> You'll also be losing NAT, which is quite nice for redirecting traffic on |
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> specific ports to whatever machine you want. As with the router |
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> functionality, you will need to configure a Linux machine to do NAT if you |
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> want to keep having that feature. |
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> |
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> There's also the issue of not being able to set up a firewall on the router |
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> itself anymore. You can still do that on the target machine itself, of |
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> course, but there's the issue of creating a firewall on the machine you want |
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> to protect, which is not optimal (the analogy here being that if you want to |
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> protect something, you put it behind a wall rather than hardening it; even |
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> if it's hardened, it still gets hit.) |
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> |
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> Or, you might not care about any of the above, in which case using the |
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> device as a simple ASDL modem (which is what bridging means) will work just |
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> fine. |
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|
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That's actually exactly what I want. The Gentoo system connected to |
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the single-port Westell modem/router is already set up as a |
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router/firewall and it is the one doing NAT. Thank you for the |
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run-down. Now I feel like I know exactly what this change will mean. |
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|
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- Grant |