| Home Broadband Internet Connections and Linux | ||
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Telstra's ADSL, like most home ADSL solutions, uses PPP over Ethernet (PPPoE) as the connection method. PPPoE is essentially the same as a PPP dialup connection, but instead of using a serial port to a dialup modem, the connection goes over an Ethernet connection to your ADSL modem.
Roaring Penguin's PPPoE client, from www.roaringpenguin.com/pppoe/
Installing Roaring Penguin's PPPoE is very easy. An RPM is available for RPM-based distributions, and the source is easy to compile on other distributions. To install from source, download the tarball, unpack it, and run (as root):
./go
This will compile and install the software, and run the adsl-setup script to let you configure your connection.
Configuring Roaring Penguin is made nice and simple by a small script called adsl-setup, which asks you for your username and password details, as well as which Ethernet interface to use, and whether to set up a basic firewall for you or not. It will also ask for your DNS settings - simply type the word "server", which tells Roaring Penguin to get it's DNS settings from Telstra's PPP server.
If you installed Roaring Penguin from the RPM, you can run adsl-setup by typing the following (as root):
/usr/sbin/adsl-setup
If you're installing from source, you don't have to run adsl-setup at all - the "./go" script will run it after building and installing the software for you.
Once you've entered in all your configuration information, you can bring the ADSL link up using the following command:
/usr/sbin/adsl-start
You should then be able to ping outside hosts, like ftp.kernel.org. To shut down the link, run the following:
/usr/sbin/adsl-stop
Unfortunately there's no easy to get Roaring Penguin to run on startup. However, it's not hard to add a line to run adsl-start to your rc.local script.