FreeBSD challenged by Internet

[RW]

On Thu, 18 Jan 2007 00:43:02 -0800
"Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm at toybox.placo.com> wrote:

> Also, these companies simply
> cannot afford to put their best programming and design
> talent on solving things like slow DNS resolver queries
> through their proxy, when these problems are reported.

The OP said that there was no problem with linux and windows, and
that's consistent with what I saw on my d-link ADSL router. Presumably
FreeBSD is doing something slightly different. I wouldn't have expected
these things to be tested against *BSD, but you would think that OS-X
would behave like FreeBSD.


> Yet, do the customers that actually have these devices,
> after going through 2 or 3 of them in that many years,
> actually stop one day and say "Gee, I'm really stupid
> to keep urinating my money away on these cheezy
> little routers when I could spend $600 on a nice new
> Cisco 800 series and get expert Cisco support on it, and
> it would work and I could then just forget about it"

Draytek is a useful halfway house for domestic and soho use -  I've
never heard anyone have a bad word to say about their wired
dsl-routers. Cisco is overkill for most people. 

> config your DSL modem out of routing mode and into bridging
> mode.

That's doesn't really buy you all that much, cheap hardware isn't
going to be more reliable in bridged-mode. DNS proxy problems are
not a big deal since it's easy to manually configure servers, or turn-on
recursive lookups. It does eliminate the problems that some
NAT routers have with large numbers of simultaneous connections though.

These problems is particularly acute in countries where PPPoA is the
norm. FreeBSD has no significant support for usb or pci PPPoA modems,
that leaves us with routers, half-bridge modems, and full-bridging
(where the ISP supports PPPoE over atm). And these bridged modems are
really just adapted nat-routers. I do envy Linux's support for pci
PPPoA modems.


> Anyway, I think you should have availed yourself of your ISP's
> tech support department first.   And if your ISP's support
> department stinks - some unfortunately do - then drop service
> and get a better one.  There's plenty more ISP's in the
> phone book.

I doubt there is any reasonably priced ISP that will help in
troubleshooting a problem that's not reproducible on Windows.