> So why do ISP's use that hideous PPPoE? What's wrong DHCP? Are they > paranoid that someone is going to hack a connection into their network or > something?
A big advantage of PPPoE is that it looks just like dialup from our end. You don't have to tell the router about a new DSL customer (other than adding the ATM interface); you just stick 'em in Radius and they're online. Likewise, Radius accounting works, so you can see how long they've been connected, etc. This also makes it easy to allocate dynamic IP addresses out of a pool - again, just like dialup. Another reason is historical. Originally, Cisco routers only supported bridged DSL in the form of a giant Ethernet broadcast domain. Customers could see each other, for example. Security and efficiency were big issues. Customers could steal other people's IP addresses just by configuring any old IP address on their PC, and it didn't scale well at all. There were various filtering hacks to help with these problems, but it was a big pain. We considered switching to PPPoE at times, ourselves. Fortunately, Cisco came out with something called RBE - Routed Bridged Encapsulation. That lets the packets come in over ATM in the form of Ethernet frames, but the router converts them into normal IP packets before it presents them on an interface. Essentially, it treats the Ethernet frame as just another encapsulation of an IP packet. Works great, scales great. That's what we're using now. -- Bruce Robertson, President/CEO +1-775-348-7299 Great Basin Internet Services, Inc. fax: +1-775-348-9412 http://www.greatbasin.net _______________________________________________ RLUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.rlug.org/mailman/listinfo/rlug
