[plug] westnet ADSL problems with Debian

[Craig Ringer]

> Same problems here, I'm with arachnet rather than Westnet. I spoke to 
> Arachnet, who were extremely helpful and could even help with Linux. They 
> told me that Telstra are locking my port. Every time it has dropped out and 
> we've rung immediately, they've found the port was locked by Telstra.

Interesting.... but I don't think thats the problem I'm having. When it 
drops out, I can immediately "poff ; sleep 5 ; pon" and it comes up - 
but the auto-"redial" doesn't work, complaning about a timeout 
recieveing conf packets or something. Seems to be a problem on _my_ side 
(wow, did I just say that? tech support people beware for your jobs).

I've just upgradeded the box to RP's pppoe v3.5 and I'll see how that goes.

>>p.s. I implemented QoS on my DSL link the other day and im amazed at the
>>increase in performance!
>  
> Westnet honor QoS on their network? Cool!

Not really - it doesn't carry through and I'm not using any weird router 
magic. The total throughput on the firewall is the same, but its more 
balanced so that if one person has 20 downloads running from 
ftp.iinet.net.au and the others are trying to read a website or get 
their email, they get a fair 1/3 or 1/4 of the total bandwidth not a 
1/23'th or whatever.

> How are you using QoS? Just to mark ssh,telnet as higher priority and 
> everything else as maximum throughput?

Using HTB, each machine gets a baseline 1/4 of the bandwidth with ciel = 
  total bandwidth. Under those machine's classes is attached a prio 
scheduler (which does things like prioritize SSH and telnet) and sfq 
buckets under that for better connection handling. Works nicely though 
the SFQ is probably useless on such a small LAN.

-- 
Craig Ringer
GPG Key Fingerprint: AF1C ABFE 7E64 E9C8 FC27  C16E D3CE CDC0 0E93 380D
	-- if it ain't broke, add features 'till it is. (or:)
	while (! broken) { features ++ ; broken = isBroken(features) }