Hardware

I've installed a Traverse Viking PCI ADSL2+ card in a Soekris net5501 system running Monowall 1.32 Embedded, but the device doesn't show up under "Interfaces" or "ifconfig".

The boot sequence shows only:
      pci0: <network, ethernet> at device 14.0 (no driver attached)

The PCI card has an embedded RealTek RTL8139C+ Ethernet chip, with the ADSL chipset behind that.  The RTL8139 is widely supported, so I was hoping it would just work ;-)

The FreeBSD 6.4 Release Notes list a driver that sounds like it should work:-

The re(4)  driver supports RealTek RTL8139C+, RTL8169, RTL816xS, RTL811xS, and RTL8101E based Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet adapters

Has anyone got this card to work with Monowall?

Does Monowall's kernel have the re(4) driver included?

Thanks,

- Martin

OK, just found http://svn.m0n0.ch/wall/trunk/build/kernelconfigs.   None of the kernel configs there include 'device re', therefore it's not surprising that it doesn't work.

Is there any chance of adding 'device re' to future builds as standard?

If not, is there a developer's VM image I can use to build my own Monowall CF card image?    Or, is it fairly straightforward to work from http://doc.m0n0.ch/dev/ substituting FreeBSD version 6.4 in place of 4.x ?

Thanks for any pointers!

- Martin

Actually the kernel config for generic-pc 1.32 is here:

http://svn.m0n0.ch/wall/branches/freebsd6/build/kernelconfigs/M0N0WALL_GENERIC

...and it includes device re. However, the embedded image doesn't (in order to save space). You could try running generic-pc on your net5501; not sure whether the serial console will work properly though.

Thanks!  The Generic image does indeed recognize the card, and the serial console works 

But there's another problem.  For initial setup, I created OPT3 for 're0', with an IP of 192.168.1.2/24.  The card's default IP is 192.168.1.1/24.  I use a no-NAT setup, i.e. Advanced Outbound NAT is switched on with an empty ruleset.

OK, the card is working: https://${monowall_ip}/exec.php can ping 192.168.1.1, and the firewall log shows the occasional silly packet:

ipmon[123]: 08:22:33.062177 re0 @0:3 b 192.168.1.1 -> 224.0.0.2 PR igmp len 24 (32) IN low-ttl multicast

But Monowall is silently dropping packets from the LAN to 192.168.1.1.  Maybe Monowall has an implicit assumption that 192.168.1.0/24 is special?  I will try PXE booting the Soekris into Voyage Linux, so that I can telnet into the modem card and change its IP address.

Just to be sure - have you changed the LAN IP address from its default of 192.168.1.1/24? If not, you'd have overlapping subnets. It would probably help if we could see the entire config.xml (minus passwords)...

[Updated]
This was a silly error on my part.  The ADSL card just needed to be configured with a default gateway: namely, the IP address of its Monowall interface.

OK it's all working now, as described here: http://martins-random-notes.blogspot.com/2010/05/traverse-viking-pci-adsl-modem.html

So this is a one-box solution for an ADSL firewall/router with Monowall.

The only caveat is that you can't use HTTP or TELNET to manage the ADSL card while it's running, because a PPPoE interface doesn't have a routable IP address in Monowall.  You could take it offline for management by temporarily assigning 're0' to have a static IP (rather than PPPoE).  But it would be better to do management via the serial console jumpers on the ADSL card, to avoid taking down the ADSL link.  I haven't tried using the serial console yet, as I need to make up a special cable to bring out the right pins to the external COM2 port connector on the case.

By the way, the ADSL card comes set up for routing by default.  To change it to PPPoE bridged mode (so that Monowall is in charge of the ADSL link, and no NAT is needed at the ADSL connection), the following commands are required after logging in to the ADSL card (admin/admin) over TELNET:

   ip delete interface ipwan
    bridge add interface br0
    bridge attach br0 ethernet
    rfc1483 add transport tr1 a1 0 38 llc bridged
    bridge add interface br1
    bridge attach br1 tr1
    system config save

Your mileage may vary, but the commands given here work for a standard UK ADSL line (BT 20CN).

There are some useful PDF documents about all this on the Traverse website.

- Martin

Here's another thought why you couldn't reach the DSL modem's management console when it was assigned as an OPT interface: did the DSL modem actually have a default route back to m0n0wall's IP address on that OPT interface? If not, then it won't know how to reply to packets coming from one of your LAN IP addresses - you'd have to add a default route or (if that is not possible on the DSL modem) enable NAT on m0n0wall so that the modem will see the packets coming from an IP address that it can reach directly.

Oh, and concerning read/write cycles - it doesn't matter, the generic-pc and embedded images are the same (i.e. m0n0wall only writes to the disk when you make configuration changes through the webGUI).

Thanks Manuel - quite correct!  My mistake.  Setting the default gateway on the ADSL card makes it all work, of course.  To do this, I temporarily enabled NAT on the Monowall (unticking the 'Advanced Outbound NAT' box).

Once you enable PPPoE in Monowall, of course you can't access the ADSL management stuff any more, because there's no routing.  It would be nice if there was some way to provide a static route to the ADSL management stuff, to allow access to HTTP, SNMP, TELNET etc.

Kind regards,

- Martin

Hi, just wanted to update this thread to confirm that native IPV6-over-ADSL is working nicely with this modem under Monowall 1.32.

UK users, if you're looking for an ADSL ISP that supports native IPV6, I can recommend niche ISP Andrews & Arnold - www.aaisp.net. Seemingly staffed entirely by cluefull geeks ;-)