Hi Folks

I'm getting a little concerned about Sky's migration from PPPoA to MER (and whether the PPPoA option will eventually be disabled). I've been using my Draytek 2820Vn with Sky (PPPoA) for several years and everything is fine at the moment, but I am getting concerned that one day I'll wake up to find I have no ADSL connection. I've just been having a search to see if anyone has resolved this, but there is surprisingly little on the www about it (and no proper solutions). Below are some comments posts I found on the skyusers forum and Billion forums. It would seem that you can make it work by specifying the ISP allocated IP address, but as these are dynamically allocated addresses, these are not exactly great solutions. Has anyone any thoughts on how we can make this work as it should do (or on why the DHCP option is not obtaining the ISP assigned address)?

Incidentally, I have tried connecting as MPoA and it does show the ADSL status at 'showtime', so it looks like it works, but it just isn't getting the DHCP information from the ISP.

Skyuser post ( here ) relating to a Draytek 2830:

Disable PPPoE/PPPoA and Enable MPoA (RFC1483/2684)
Encapsulation: 1483 Bridged IP VC-Mux
VPI 0
VCI 40
Specify an IP address : Enter your IP and GW from your Sky router here
MAC Address: Again, take this from your Sky router
DNS: Enter the Sky ones ( 90.207.238.97 and 90.207.238.99 in my case )

Billion post ( here ):

If anyone is with Sky Broadband and your router has upgraded to the 2.04 firmware, which enabled MER connection, try the following in your Billion or other 3rd party router.

For now, I think this will work with MER, as the IP address is dynamic, but the IP address assigned rarely changes, or has a long lease time from Sky for now. So you will need the IP Address, Subnet Mask and Default Gateway and DNS servers from connecting your Sky router, taking note of them, then re-connecting your Billion.

Profile Port: ADSL
Protocol: MPoA (RFC1483, Multiprotocol Encapsulation over AAL5)
Description: [Anything You Want]
VPI: 0
VCI: 40
Encap. Method: VC/MUX
NAT: Enabled
MAC Spoofing: WAN MAC address from Sky router
IP: As Sky router
Netmask: As Sky router
Gateway: As Sky router
Obtain DNS: As Sky router or Google Primary: 8.8.8.8 Google Secondary: 8.8.4.4

If you want to try Dynamic method, just leave the IP Address set to 0.0.0.0.

If this does not work, you can always still use the PPPoA connection method, until the revoke PPPoA access to the network.

Any thoughts on all this would be most welcome.

Bri

...or could this be the answer?

Sky's implementation of MER is not standard. It appears that you do need the log in details but this isn't possible with standard firmwares.

( see here, and also the posts below it )

Bri

Hi

Someone has posted a potential answer on the Skyusers forum ( see here ):

Vendor ID (option 60, -d switch):
firmwareversion|2ndHardwareSerial|skysg2|1stHardwa reSerial

e.g. 2.8Sky|123456789A|skysg2|LK012345678

Client ID (option 61, -c switch):
PPPUsername|PPPPassword

Setting these to the correct values on a 3rd party router should allow you to get an IP with MER. The hard part now is finding routers which support setting them (probably the best bet is using one of the many OpenWRT compatible routers as this seems to support it). The hardware serials are obtained using the "fast" command (I think its something like fast factory-info read if I remember correctly) in telnet, there may be an easier way to find them however (maybe written on the bottom of the router?). It is possible that typing in the wrong values would still allow connection however, it depends on whether sky have bothered to make a database of every router serial number they have released.

I wonder if we could enter the first part as the MPoA 'Router Name'. If so, I wonder how we could take care of the user/password string (maybe a CLI entry)? Of course, I can't telnet into my existing Sagem router to find out what the vendor info currently is, so that's another hassle.

Bri

Hi

This is all getting quite interesting as it seems that someone has made significant progress; they have just managed to get a third party modem to connect and obtain a WAN IP address. There's a good thread here and a wiki has been started here .

Below is some information from that first link:

I've pulled a WAN IP from Sky via DHCP. To do this I connected a bridged modem to the phone line, and connected Ubuntu to that. Then I played with dhclient and put the following in dhclient.conf:

send dhcp-client-identifier "pppoa-username|pppoa-password"

That's it, dhclient grabbed the WAN IP after that. No messing with vendor ID, even MAC spoofing was not required, the only dhclient option needed is dhcp-client-identifier with the username and password.

I tried the below:

> ip dhcpc option dhcp-client-identifier "xxxxxxxxxxxx@skydsl|xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"
% Too many inputs !!!

Oh well, it was worth a shot!

DrayTek now have a beta available for the Vigor 2830 for test against SKY's MAC Encapsulated Routing authentication mechanism. If anyone is interested in testing then please contact support (Ref DK3180) via http://www.draytek.co.uk/support/techquery.html

This is all getting quite interesting as it seems that someone has made significant progress; they have just managed to get a third party modem to connect and obtain a WAN IP address.