[ale] OK phew, I think I fixed it.

Charles Shapiro hooterpincher at gmail.com
Thu Sep 6 19:04:38 EDT 2012


I had an Asus RT-N16 running tomato connected over TCP/IP to a Hawking
HAR11 modem/router with a static route over DSL to my ISP, but was
experiencing a really really slow connection ( like, ping times in
excess of 1/2 second). The usual dance with customer support revealed
nothing -- they even rolled a truck and verified that my connection at
the outside wall of the house was good.

When I tried to connect to the HAR11 over my local network, I found
that it was responding very slowly.  So I got meself one of them
Netgear DM111PSP modems, figuring that the POC HAR11 was showing its
age.  This device claims to be a "modem/router", but apparently lacks
the ability to do NAT.  The symptom I was seeing was that although the
modem was logging in to the ISP just fine, and I could run the
on-board diagnostics to ping(1) and resolve hostnames, I couldn't
actually connect to anywhere outside my house from the RT-N16.

After a googlin' on the Mighty Internet for a whiles, I put the
DM111PSP into "full bridge" mode ( that is, used its internal
web-based config program to put it into "Modem Mode") to disable all
routing and act only as a modem, then told Tomato to handle all of the
PPPOE chores on its WAN side. So far that seems to have done the
trick. We'll see if it stays fixed.  Alas, since the modem is running
in "full bridge" mode, the only way to connect to it from inside the
walls is to change the RT-N16 back to a "static" router on the WAN
side and call the DM111PSP the gateway.  Otherwise, I can't route to
my modem from behind the router.  Bummer.

-- CHS


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