PPPoA section of FreeBSD Handbook

[RW]

On Tue, 20 Nov 2012 11:51:51 +1100
andrew clarke wrote:

> On Tue 2012-11-20 11:49:38 UTC+1100, andrew clarke
> (mail at ozzmosis.com) wrote:
> 
> > In the meantime I've switched to using mpd5 (/usr/ports/net/mpd5)
> > and /sbin/ipnat. So far, so good:
> > 
> > # ifconfig ng0
> > ng0: flags=88d1<UP,POINTOPOINT,RUNNING,NOARP,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST>
> > metric 0 mtu 1492 inet 124.170.51.116 --> 203.215.7.251 netmask
> > 0xffffffff 
> 
> Incidentally the PPPoA section of the FreeBSD is very out of date:
> 
> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/pppoa.html
> 
> The ambiguously named net/pppoa port in section 28.6.1 has been marked
> as broken since 2009. (Ambiguous since it's only for a particular
> brand of USB ASDL modem.)
> 
> In section 28.6.2 the example provided is a config file for mpd 4.x
> which does not work in mpd 5.x.
> 
> net/mpd4 was deleted from the ports tree 11 months ago.
> 
> net/mpd5 doesn't seem to support PPPoA, only PPPoE. I could find no
> reference to PPPoA in the manual or source code.

Not many people really need that these days.  
 
PPPoA support is needed for obsolete USB modems which pass-through
ATM for the host to terminate. There are also some pci modems supported
by Linux, but I don't think they've been well supported on FreeBSD, if
at all. 

These days there are better options that only require standards-based
support in the host. Most PPPoA-based ISPs also support  PPPoE over ATM
- even if they don't advertise it or tell their low-level technical
support.  Alternatively you can:

- use a NAT router that terminate PPPoA
- use a router/modem that bridges PPPoA to PPPoE
- use a router/modem that terminates PPPoA and passes the public IP
  address to the host