The Boston Diaries


Go figure.

Wednesday, March 01, 2006

More tunneling issues

At the end of January, I called out to the Lazy Web for advice on how to get a Cisco 2611 to authenticate a PPPoE connection and well, it's finally working (with no input from said Lazy Web):

interface ATM0/0
 description XXXXXXXXXX Secondary Internet Connection
 no ip address
 no atm ilmi-keepalive
 pvc 6/42
  encapsulation aal5snap
  protocol ppp dialer
  dialer pool-member 1
 dsl operating-mode auto
interface Dialer0
 description Authentication Happens Here
 ip address XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX
 encapsulation ppp
 dialer pool 1
 dialer-group 1
 ppp chap hostname XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
 ppp chap password 7 XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
dialer-list 1 protocol ip permit

But I do have to admit some confusion over why it suddenly started working. I had this configuration pretty much in place by the end of January but I just couldn't even see the customer's router by DSL (which, as you can see there, is a backup connection in case their router's primary connection goes down). It's hard to debug this since you don't even see the traffic unless you pass an authencation request through the physical lines owned by The Monopolistic Phone Company, and because the radius authentication server wasn't getting any requests, that meant that our Cisco router wasn't seeing any DSL traffic from the customer.

Very annoying.

Then earlier this week BAM traffic suddenly was getting through. It's almost as if The Monopolistic Phone Company took their own sweet time in actually enabling the DSL circuit on our customer's phone line.

Good thing too, since their current provider is having issues with connectivity (and twice this week I've had to reprogram their router's primary IP address). Now the issue is why the router is prefering the DSL connection over their primary connection (which is the exact opposite of what is supposed to happen).

Update on March 2nd, 2006

I found out why why the DSL was being prefered over the Ethernet connection.

Obligatory Picture

[It's the most wonderful time of the year!]

Obligatory Links

Obligatory Miscellaneous





