Hello.

I've been investigating Draytek's products today after a colleague suggested them as the "must have" ADSL products for the more technically discerning user. In particular, the Vigor 120 has caught my eye as a possible replacement for the Netgear router that I currently have.

The modem-only concept of the product appeals as I'd prefer to pass internet traffic directly to a self-built FreeBSD machine with as little modification as possible. I'll then configure NAT and port forwarding on that host and run any services that I want listening on the Internet IP directly.

I have an O2 LLU ADSL2+ service with the static IP address option. I'm already aware that I'll need to change some settings on the modem to use it with that connection type and have found the details on the Draytek site. I'm still a little unclear on what networking configuration I might need on my own gateway host though.

Will I need to run some kind of PPP client software on the FreeBSD host, or can I simply configure the modem-connected ethernet interface with the static IP that O2 allocated to me, and it'll Just Work?

Once the connection is configured correctly and I have the Internet IP up and running on my FreeBSD host, will I still be able to communicate directly with the modem to get to its web interface?

Thanks for any advice.

jmann wrote: ...I'm already aware that I'll need to change some settings on the modem to use it with that connection type and have found the details on the Draytek site...

Yip, http://www.draytek.co.uk/support/kb_vigor100_setup.html

jmann wrote: ...I'm still a little unclear on what networking configuration I might need on my own gateway host though...

You'll just need to put your O2 wan network details, the static IP, subnet mask, default gateway then dns1 and dns2 on the FreeBSD host and it'll just work.

jmann wrote: ...will I still be able to communicate directly with the modem to get to its web interface...

Well, not without a clart. But your FreeBSD setup may be clever enough to route requests for 192.168.2.1 out on the wan. There is broadly never any reason to need to look at the modem stats - unless something isn't right with your ADSL.
Be careful as there is a 120 version 1 and a 120 version 2 - v2 not listed yet (at the time of writing) on the UK downloads page - to get the correct firmware and update your unit for best results.
You may also need to add the command ip arp accept 1 to the BSDbox but I don't know enough about that platform - sorry!

Enjoy, regards,

Neal

Thanks for your response Neal.

I guess that I'll have to give the FreeBSD host's ethernet interface a second IP address, alongside the public Internet IP, but in the same subnet as the modem's management IP.

I'd like to query the modem stats for byte in/out counters if available and maybe pop them into an RRD graph. I can't find any mention of the device supporting SNMP, so I'll probably have to scrape the HTML for the values.