[lug] IP on computer, not modem

[Nate Duehr]

On Oct 4, 2010, at 11:02 PM, Alfred G. de Wijn wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I'm currently enjoying broadband internet access through a Qwest stand-alone DSL, and a 3rd party ISP (FRII) that provides me with a static IP.  This setup allows me to put my Cisco 678 DSL modem into RFC1483 bridging mode, which basically has the effect that I end up with a globally routable IP on my computer, rather than on my modem.  It also costs a bunch of cash every month.
> 
> I've recently moved a lot of services to a VPS, so I no longer need a static IP at home.  I like my ISP, but I like beer better so I'm trying to trim the 3rd party ISP plus static IP from my bill.  The only thing is that I would very much like to keep the globally routable IP on the computer.  I've googled around, some people claim it's impossible with Qwest, others claim it's possible but only with PPPoE and not PPPoA, yet others say one must have a static IP to do it.  It's hard to find information that appears reliable.  From what I did find, I concluded it's possible to have some sort of bridging setup with PPPoE (but I can't confirm if it's RFC1483 or something else), and some sort of "half bridging" (couldn't find much details on that) with PPPoA.  In a moment of utter despair, I called Qwest tech support, but alas the poor guy I talked to had no clue what I was on about.
> 
> Does anyone have a setup similar to my own but without the static IP and 3rd party ISP on a Qwest DSL line?
> 
> Cheers,
> Alfred
> -- 
> Alfred G. de Wijn (dwijn at iluvatar.org)
> web: http://www.iluvatar.org/~dwijn


I'll see what I can offer here for advice...

When I had Qwest service (many moons ago) the external IP of their router was always a real public-routable IP... unlike certain cheap mom & pop shops I've run into doing support for a VoIP application over the years.

If you can still log into their routers (I could on the old Cisco 678, and it sounds like you'd keep yours... good little router, they were...) you could port-forward everything into your own internal router and then just use the external IP for whatever you wanted, letting your internal router handle divvying up the traffic by port number to whatever internal machines you wanted.

The only trick would be that the external public-routable IP on the Qwest router's external interface could change... and a service like DynDNS would alleviate that... just use your own DNS "name" through their service to get to "your" current public IP address.

We've helped literally thousands of folks set this up for an Amateur Radio VoIP radio linking application over the years, and only had a few ISP's that simply wouldn't "play ball"... they usually were wireless ISP's that had "cheaped out" and not bought enough address space for their customers, and were using RFC 1918 (internal only) addresses for delivery of services to their customer's external router interface at the residence.  

The NAT to a public address was handled upstream at the ISP's head end.  This obviously causes all sorts of grief for other applications as well, and a fair number of them, when pushed/requested by their customers, held a number of real IP's in "reserve" to assign to customer's routers.  They just wouldn't do it for the average residential user doing a little light websurfing and e-mail... Anyway, off on a tangent there, but those ISP's are nuts... 

So I think you should be able to do this with any Qwest connection, PPPoe, PPPoA, it really shouldn't matter.  As long as you can tell their router to send everything inside... and it should... then do some creative port-forwarding on your own router, and you'll be all set.

Also, I don't know if this would apply to NEW user pricing, but Comcast got downright crazy with their pricing for me this year.  I had previously been on a 2 year *commercial* contract with them (slightly $pendy), and when I called to cancel commercial service to switch to residential class service for similar reasons as yours (no need for static IPs), they offered me $34.99/month for 15M down/3M up plus $4 for continuing my statics.  That was a 50% price reduction or very close to it from the originally contracted rate.  

So... prices keep falling in the broadband world.  

Sadly, I liked FRII as a company and their customer service was top-notch, but they can't compete with that kind of price for that kind of speed.

My dad went through some very obvious Qwest shennanigans at his old house where his FRII connection was dropping regularly, etc... he had a lot of time on his hands, and with a little coaching from me, he pressed the issue... hard... since it had worked fine for years.  The final word from Qwest was that they had "installed fiber to the neighborhood" and that the "fiber system was incompatible with the type of connection he had from FRII and interference was impossible to alleviate".  This stunk to high-heaven of anti-competitive behavior, since I know for a fact, having worked in telco for 15 years, that there's zero good technical reason for that if the outside plant is built properly, and Qwest isn't using devices on the copper pairs that are simply driving so hot that they create cross-talk in the cable bundles... but even a letter to the PUC went unanswered, and the CEO of FRII himself sent a note to my dad saying he was seriously pissed off at Qwest, but there was little he could do about it.  

Frankly, it convinced me that the PUC is completely in Qwest's pockets (and probably pocketbook).  Unfortunately my dad was also in the process of moving to a rural area not served by anyone other than a wireless ISP, and maybe Qwest (he started to check, but after the scenario at the other house, he figured... why give Qwest another dime, ever again?  His cell phone isn't with them, and the rural local small ISP could handle the Internet access -- so, bye bye Qwest.)

Anyway... back to some other information... I hear rumors that my neighborhood's DOCSIS 3 conversion is completed, and that much of the Denver Metro area is (perhaps all?) so in theory I could virtually double that download speed with a new modem, but as-is... 15 Mb/s is plenty fast enough for me!  And a long ways from the days when I paid $90/month for 128kb/s over an ISDN line + another $40/mo for a phone number on one of the B-channels, after purchasing a $350 modem!  If Comcast wants me to move to the new standard, they can let me know... I own this modem so they can certainly pay for the next one...

So... 

Long and short... if you have any other option besides Qwest, be sure to shop all of them, and pit them against one another on price.  You may be surprised at what offers "magically" appear on the salesperson's screen once they hit the "competition" button.  They're all playing massive pricing games right now.  TV being the other one.  I dropped Dish after over 10 years of being a customer, and picked up an AppleTV.  It covers 90% of what I want to watch, and works great for my Netflix subscription and my penchant for listening to podcasts, since the ones I'm interested in are all willing to syndicate through the iTunes platform... cool to hear friend's shows coming out of my TV (or see them if they're doing video), and completely ignore commercial broadcast television, most of the time.

Gotta love disruptive tech.  Roku and others also joining the fray, maybe even with "better" products if you don't want to live in Apple's "walled garden", which isn't too "walled" since I'm sitting here watching Netflix on the thing, and a friend's podcast out of Michigan.... 

Tonight I noticed some errors getting certain content with the AppleTV, and while I haven't done any digs or packet captures, they all mysteriously went away when I switched from Comcast's DNS servers to someone elses... gee... go figure.  The next battleground... TV/Cable Internet providers mucking with DNS to make Internet distribution of TV problematic for the average Joe who doesn't know DNS from a hole in their head... 

Got off on a tangent there.  Yes, you should be able to switch from a static IP to a non-static with Qwest and still get access to the machines remotely.  They may block common port numbers, so you may have to do a little creative re-mapping, and I wouldn't expect that you could (easily) run any kind of service for others on it, but it'd work most of the time for your needs.

--
Nate Duehr
nate at natetech.com