[H-GEN] Telstra Big Pond Cable & OpenBSD

[Ian Lister]

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Hi all,

After convincing somebody they shouldn't use Windows as a masquerading
gateway connected to Telstra Big Pond Cable I now need to produce a working
alternative.

BTW Big Pond is a given and being installed the day after tomorrow, only the
OS is negotiable, and needs to be ready by then too. I would prefer to use
OpenBSD but any "home unix" would be OK. FWIW the machine it is to run on is
a P75 with 32MB RAM.

Although I haven't dealt with cable first hand yet, my understanding is that
the only thing that's not fairly straightforward network setup is the
authentication software Telstra uses. I have found the Cable Modem
mini-howto, which says to use software designed for the US RoadRunner
service (available at
<ftp://ftp.vortech.net/pub/rrlinux/rrclientd-1.3.tar.gz>). It is made for
Slackware and RedHat but one page mentioned that some people have had
success under FreeBSD. Does anybody here know of it working with Big Pond
and OpenBSD (or another BSD, or anything)?

I have had a quick look at the RoadRunner software I mentioned above and
noticed a few things: 

1) the version (1.3) mentioned in the howto is available at that address, as
well as 2.35. Neither the site nor the howto mentions whether the
significantly newer version would be better or if the older version is
required. The fact that it's still there implies there is still some
potential need for it over the newer one.

2) the howto says to replace /etc/services with examples/Nassau/services
from the distribution but there is not even an examples directory in it and
I can't find anything that looks like it anywhere. Does anybody know either
(a) where it is, or (b) what the differences are between it and a "normal"
/etc/services?

Also, does anybody know what kind of card Telstra provides, and what support
various BSDs/Linuxes have for it? Any other problems I am likely to hit?

Thanks,

Ian Lister


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