After many sleepless nights I bring you:

Linux Wired Country Notes

This is an addition to LinuxPPPoENotes

This is not complete, but I will work on it as things progress

Details:

• Region: Auckland
• Flavourrs: Debian, m0n0wall (freeBSD), XP (flatmates...)
• Gear: Wired Country IDL (Network adaptor, goes to antenna), Cisco ATA188 (uplinks to IDL, outputs Ethernet, 2x VoIP phones)

It appears that the IDL will only give out 1 (one) DHCP lease, so if you want to connect a machine you need to power down the gear, connect the machine and power the gear backup to clear the lease table... If you don't power down the gear you wont be able to connect from any machine except that connected at first power up.. took me 3 days to find this out O_o

Powering down the Gear: IDL: just unplug the power ?? ATA188: disconnect ethernet cables (both link and uplink), wait 20 sec, unplug power. (from Cisco 186 user manual - GoogleIt?)

Powering up the Gear:

1. Connect IDL Power
2. Wait a while
3. Conect ATA188 ethernet cables then power.... If ATA188 light keeps flashing for longer than 20sec or so, unplug power for a few seconds
4. check dial tone.
5. Connect via PPPoE (if your computer hasnt already)

M0n0wall config

Note: I am using a Beta release of M0n0wall. There may be some issues with PPPoE in the stable release. This is a breeze, just setup a PPPoE connection in the WAN section of the WebGUI. Enter you user and passwd, leave service name empty. Config your lan, NAT and firewall settings and away you go. I've had some problems with PHP crashing on M0n0wall, but I think this is isolated to my system and not a PPPoE issue.

Notes from a WC user

CPE

Client premises equipment, i.e. the radio and kit at the clients end

POP

Point of presence, i.e. the radio all the clients point to, in Hamilton it's on top of the Hosptal.

I've been with WC since early days in the Hamilton. I've also been involved with it since before I had a connection myself, as I worked for Wave and we offered it to our customers. My first connection was with Wave, staff deal and it was also helpful for diagnosing problems with other customers etc.

My connection is through Ihug now, they are fine as long as you know what your doing, do not expect their support team to be of any use if you run into trouble. You'll get the standard "Reboot your CPE", "We'll just take a look at your network settings, right click your Network Neighbour...." the usual stuff, mention Linux and you'll get silence. Ihug use PPPoe and it works beautifully. I chose Ihug because they offer the cheapest deal I could find at the time.

Wired Country have more outages than they would care to publicise. Sometimes you'll need to power cycle the CPE, this is fairly common after WC push out firmware updates for the CPE (supposed to be seamless, but you know how things are). Failing that you just need to wait until they fix whatever is wrong at the POP (or their backhaul) most of their outages affect everyone hanging of the POP, sometimes the outages just affect the people further away from the POP, depending on what is wrong with said POP. Lately service has been fairly good in Hamilton but there have been periods where it has been really bad, ebs and flows...

Faulty CPEs aren't overly common however it can be very painful diagnosing one, especially if your ISP's support people are not up with the play (there is a little more to it than a windows dialup connection). Persistence is key.

Your best method for troubleshooting a problem would actually be to contact another person that uses the service and points to the same POP, if your both down it's likely the POP (if it's not your ISP doing something silly).

When there are problems clients need to call their ISP in the first instance, do not call WC directly - THEY DO NOT LIKE IT.

When the service is going well it ROCKS, when it's not it is incredibly frustrating. Just make sure you have a el cheapo dial up connection or something available if you can't live without the Internet for a few hours every other month or two.

If you can get it, do.

Cheers, James.