DSL without running pppoe… sorta
Just a quick note that it is possible to set up a basic westell dsl modem to take care of the PPPoE side of things and still act like a bridge. I use it like this to allow me to simply run DHCP on my firewall and get the outside IP address instead of the NAT’d private IP space address.
Update: It seems that the built in DHCP server on the westell is just crappy. The connection died several times in a row. Finally, I set my firewall ip to static and things seems much more stable. One more change: I also upped the number of acceptable LCP echo failures from 6 to 3o. Since the connection was dropping so often, it made sense to crank up the limit.
I can still access the modem admin stuff too. I also set the connection to be always on in the profile editor. For some reason they think that having your DSL modem connect on demand is a good idea by default. (This is a retarded idea. The on demand connection is so slow that it makes you think your high priced DSL service is junk.)