My wife's new clinic connects to CenturyLink DSL with an Actiontec GT701D modem. I found a Qwest-branded Actiontec M1000 DSL modem at Goodwill for $5 (and the wall wart at the thrift shop five blocks away!), and swapped it in as an alternative. It worked also, so now the office has a backup modem on the shelf, with instructions for use in case the GT701D fails.
I'm told that, besides the PPPoE username and password, some ISPs have MAC address authentication, requiring connection to one particular piece of customer hardware. That is the case for our CenturyLink business account, which is good news. Next, connecting the Alix firewall box (running linux and the pppoe kernel module) through one of those modems in Transparent Bridging mode. Although both Actiontec modems run MonteVista embedded Linux under the hood, I prefer distros I can maintain, back up, terminate VPNs, do DNS, etc. Keith P.S. I was in Goodwill looking for old style POTS analog phones, the wired kind that don't need wall warts. We will be automating the phones with Asterisk, but I want emergency phones that work when the power is out, at least until we can bring in a portable generator. I didn't find any plain old phones at three different Goodwills, lots of cheap cordless handsets missing the wall warts. -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected] Voice (503)-520-1993 KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon" Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
