>> I called AT&T and they say the Westell 6100 modem/router I have will >> not respond to pings. They said I could put it into bridged mode and >> set up PPPoE on the computer connected to it which would cause ICMP >> packets to pass through to the computer. Would you guys recommend >> that? For sure I won't attempt this until I'm in the same room as the >> device. > > You'll lose the router functionality doing that. If you need to connect > other machines to it, then it will only be able to act as a switch, meaning > that everything you connect to it will either need to be on the same subnet, > or you need to configure another machine to act as a router if you need to > connect different subnets. And the machine will also need to be always on > in order to provide internet connectivity to other machines, since it will > be the one that talks to the ADSL modem. > > You'll also be losing NAT, which is quite nice for redirecting traffic on > specific ports to whatever machine you want. As with the router > functionality, you will need to configure a Linux machine to do NAT if you > want to keep having that feature. > > There's also the issue of not being able to set up a firewall on the router > itself anymore. You can still do that on the target machine itself, of > course, but there's the issue of creating a firewall on the machine you want > to protect, which is not optimal (the analogy here being that if you want to > protect something, you put it behind a wall rather than hardening it; even > if it's hardened, it still gets hit.) > > Or, you might not care about any of the above, in which case using the > device as a simple ASDL modem (which is what bridging means) will work just > fine.
That's actually exactly what I want. The Gentoo system connected to the single-port Westell modem/router is already set up as a router/firewall and it is the one doing NAT. Thank you for the run-down. Now I feel like I know exactly what this change will mean. - Grant
