[plug] [OT] bur.st unreachable

[Andrew Howell]

On Thu, 2004-08-12 at 14:26 +0800, Craig Ringer wrote:
> Ben Jensz wrote:
> > Its not hosted on an ADSL connection is it?  Because there have been 
> > major outages on Telstra's ADSL network today that are apparently still 
> > going.  This affects all ISPs offering ADSL via Telstra's ADSL network 
> > (pretty much everyone).  Its affected authentication I believe... so 
> > bridged users (like my work) haven't had a problem.
> 
> It's more complicated than that - there may be several issues. What kept 
> us off-line at work this morning was the DSLAM insisting that we already 
> had 'too many sessions for this host' and refusing to initiate a PPPoE 
> session. This was with a DSL modem in bridged mode using PPPoE on the host.
> 
> Bizarrely, switching the DSL modem to "router" on WestNet support's 
> advice mode and letting it do its own PPPoE solved the problem. WTF?!?. 
> They say it's nothing to do with specific PPPoE clients, but instead 
> affects the use of ADSL modems in bridged mode with a PPPoE client on an 
> internal host. There's obviously a big hole in my understanding of how 
> this stuff works, because I would've sworn their solution couldn't 
> possibly fix the problem if I hadn't learned never, ever to say 
> "impossible" quite some time ago.

I've seen the same thing happen before and fixed it by changing the NIC
on the linux box so we were using a different MAC address. What I was
seeing was PPPOE PADT packet sent from telstra killing the link whenever
I tried connecting with the old card. With the new card it was fine.

Couldn't get anyone at Telstra or the ISP involved to agree with me (I
don't think I was talking to anyone who knew enough) but I believe the
MAC address was getting blacklisted somehow. I've had the same thing
happen again and managed to get telstra to reset some gear which fixed
it.

So anyway, changing your ADSL modem to router mode would change the MAC
address of the PPPOE client, so if my theory is correct then that's why
that worked :)

Andrew

-- 
Andrew Howell
Director
Informed Technology
E-mail: andrew at it.net.au
Ph: 08 9380 4244  Fax: 08 9380 4354