Penguin
Note: You are viewing an old revision of this page. View the current version.

World-Net sell a cheap PCI ADSL Modem which is branded as an Access-Runner. This modem contains a Conexant Tigris chipset and is reasonably easy to get going it linux once you know what to do. The basic steps are below. This is probably going to be quite debian specific seeing as I only run debian.

  1. Build & Configure Modem Driver
  2. Build & Configure PPPoA (PPP over ATM)

Quirks

The only quirk I have found with the modem so far is that the lights on the back do not go. So if your modem looks dead don't be fooled!

Build & Configure Modem Driver

Obtain Modem Driver Source

I orignally obtained the source for the module from the NZDSL site. It is all packaged in RPM format and if you were running Redhat with the right kernel version you might be lucky enough to get away with just installing the RPM. However for those of us on debian it takes a bit more work. I extracted the source from the RPM and built the module and the associated utilites from that.

You can find the source at the following location http://www.wlug.org.nz/archive/Conexant/CnxADSL-TgrATM_k2.4.3-6.1.2.007.tar.bz2

Apparently it is for Kernel 2.4.3 but I have successfully run it with Kernels 2.4.19 and 2.4.20, it does complain about unresolved symbols, however ignoring this message does not seem to break anything :) You may need to install gcc-2.95 to compile the source correctly.

  1. Extract the archive, change into the Directory
  2. make
  3. make install

This will install some userspace tools for configuring the modem (we'll deal with these in a minute) and also the kernel module. By default the kernel module seems to be installed into

/lib/modules/2.4.3-12/misc/CnxADSL.o

which is almost certainly not going to be in your current module path. I suggest that you copy it to

/lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/net/CnxADSL.o

That's the driver done.

Configure the Driver

Actually getting the driver to load successfully is another story altogether. I have created a script that sits in /etc/init.d and runs on boot to configure the modem correctly. You can find this script below, but first.

  1. Edit /etc/Conexant/cnxadsl.conf

  2. Replace the /etc/init.d/cnxadslctl that was supplied with the module with the following script http://www.wlug.org.nz/archive/Conexant/cnxadslctl

    • This script is very similar to the original, but I have modified it to work correctly with debian. The important parts are the parameters that are passed to the module, don't ask me what they are needed for, but they are, and the call to cnxadslconfig to set the VPI and the VCI.
  3. run the script and check that it loads the module successfully.
  4. Set the script to run automatically on Startup and shutdown

    • update-rc.d cnxadslctl start 42 S . stop 42 0 6 .

Configure PPPoA

The modem driver is now up and running. However before you can actually get on the internet you will need to configure PPPoA.

Setting up PPPoA in Linux is documented on the following page LinuxPPPoA.