I've got this modem working with the CD provided for windows and am now trying to get it run under Linux. Nextel tech help is hopeless and it takes 30mins on the phone to even get anyone who is hopeless.
Nextel is deploying BPL (broadband over power line) in the RTP area as a test for later deploying it elsewhere in the country. The modem looks like a wifi WAP except with only one antenna. The link seems to be over the power line or phone lines, don't really know how it works. The CD for Windows appears to contain only a monitoring gui. The actual connection to the modem (and retrieval of gateway and dns servers info) seems to be setup by dhcp. It doesn't appear to be pppoe or anything fancy (no username/passwd). The problem I'm having is the the IP you get by dhcp is not on the same network at the default gw and I don't know how to route to the default gw under linux. Windows doesn't have a problem with this but I don't know why. The link layer seems fine (can retrieve dhcp info in both Linux and Windows) Here's the IPs I get by dhcp (same under Linux/Windows) my static IP=65.76.244.243/24 default gw =172.29.251.133 DNS =172.29.251.x and y (two entries) dhcp server =172.30.30.128 (assume is an IP on the modem) ipconfig under windows shows only the static IP on the NIC and the 127.0.0.1 on lo, so nothing fancy here. Since routing isn't via an IP on the modem, I assume the modem is a bridge. When the windows machine is setup, I can connect through the modem and make tcp connections to the outside world (eg ftp, run nslookup). I can't ping the default gw, the DNS machines, or the dhcpserver. I can ping outside machines (eg www.duke.edu). I didn't know the equivalent of traceroute under windows (it's tracert I find), so I didn't get to determine the routing to the outside world went by the default gw. I can imagine that they might want to turn off pinging to the DNS machines, but it's not obvious why they'd turn off pinging for the default gw. Here's the output of `route print` on the windows box dest mask gw if 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 172.29.251 65.76.244.243 65.76.244.243 255^4 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 65.255.255.255 255^4 65.76.244.243 65.76.244.243 255^4 255^4 65.76.244.243 65.76.244.243 gw 172.29.251.133 does anyone understand how packets are being routed from 65.76.244.243/24 on the NIC to the default gw at 172.29.251.133? The top line here is the usual default gw line as seen by `route` in unix, except that in unix the two addresses must be in the same network. Under linux I can't install the default gw - I get "no route to host" I've heard that you can just dhcp from an OSX box too and get connected without doing anything special, so it's got to be fairly simple, if only I can figure out what "simple" is. The person who told me about doing it on OSX didn't know what the routing table looked like. Thanks Joe -- Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina jmack (at) wm7d (dot) net - azimuthal equidistant map generator at http://www.wm7d.net/azproj.shtml Homepage http://www.austintek.com/ It's GNU/Linux! -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/ TriLUG PGP Keyring : http://trilug.org/~chrish/trilug.asc
