Re: Help needed with Qwest/MSN DSL...

[Justin Krejci <krejci@attbi.com>]

I work in St. Paul and live near it. We have a DSL line at work that used to 
be Qwest but we switched ISPs because it was going to the Qwest/MSN split 
ownership. I have never heard of Arescom before, only Intel for the internal 
and Cisco 675/678 for external. Qwest routinely has problems with network 
connectivity and their DSLAMS are (or used to be a year ago) daisy chained in 
a circle which made for even worse connections. My brother switched to cable 
because he lost his connection and IP changed every few days (sometimes it 
was good for up to 2 weeks too). I would recommend using Visi (www.visi.com) 
as they are a supremely superior company in every way conceiveable. They are 
local, they are unix friendly (let you have unix shell {and you pick your 
shell} access to your free web/ftp/telnet space they give you), they use 
static IP addresses for all dsl customers too, and their support is actually 
worth a damn!  

I know this doesn't solve your current problem, but if changing ISPs is 
possible, I recommend it fully as it would probably take care of the 
situation and just result it a better more peacful life. 

My $.02
-Justin

On Sunday 30 June 2002 08:45 pm, you wrote:
> I've given a firewall (OpenBSD -current mid June) to a friend in St Paul,
> MN on the Qwest/MSN DSL service, and I'm having trouble keeping it
> on-line.  Once it drops off-line, I'm have to have my friend reboot the
> firewall.  It is then online and functioning great for roughly 3 days,
> when I lose the connection again.
>
> Qwest/MSN DSL is rather bizarre in that they provide an Arescom modem that
> NAT's the internal connection automatically, but none of the modem's
> configuration is available on the model provided.  You get what Qwest/MSN
> says and that's that.
>
> Here is a rough picture of the network as I see it:
>
>   63.229.208.60			sample external IP (changes regularly)
>
>
>   192.168.1.1			NATed internal address of Arescom modem
>
> 	|				(constant)
>
>   192.168.1.2			dhclient established external address of
>
> 	|				firewall (also constant)
>
>      10.1.1.1			internal address of firewall
>
>
>      10.1.1.5			address of WinME workstation
>  					(dhcpd-server supplied)
>
> A typical log entry from dhclient (logged through socklog, hence the
> double time stamps):
>
> 2002-06-30 09:56:19.180804500 daemon.info: Jun 30 09:56:19 dhclient:
> DHCPREQUEST on ep0 to 192.168.1.1 port 67
> 2002-06-30 09:56:19.190915500 daemon.info:Jun 30 09:56:19 dhclient:
> DHCPACK from 192.168.1.1
> 2002-06-30 09:56:19.239860500 daemon.info: Jun 30 09:56:19 dhclient: bound
> to 192.168.1.2 -- renewal in 43200 seconds.
>
>
> Dhclient on the firewall is showing 192.168.1.x addresses, as it should.
> I've run tcpdump on the external interface of the firewall for weeks now,
> and I have yet gain a clue as to why I'm losing internet connectivity.
>
> What is renewing the lease on the external (routable IP) address of the
> Arescom modem?  The modem itself?  If so, does anyone have any
> experience/advice as to why it is dropping internet connectivity?
>
> I'm so clueless and frustrated right now with a firewall that will work
> flawlessly for 3-4 days at a time and then drop internet connectivity
> without any error messages in any of the logs so that I don't even know
> what to add to this e-mail to provide more information.
>
> I'm ready to provide whatever is needed, though, as soon as my friend
> reboots the firewall and gets it back on-line, that is.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Jeff