[TriLUG] help setting up Nextel BPL modem under Linux

[Joseph Mack NA3T]

On Fri, 9 Jul 2004, Aaron S. Joyner wrote:

> Let us know how it works out.

I got it working. It turns out that when you find a spot that has enough
signal strength, that dhclient works just fine, giving you a IP with a
sensible netmask (not /32) and a default gw in the same network as the IP
you get (rather than some unrelated network).

The other night we got a /32 IP with a default gw in another network. If
there's no signal at all you get an IP in the network of the dhcpd on the
modem (which is a different network again) and a default route in the
network of the dhcpd.

So you can get IPs in 3 different networks, depending on signal strength,
only one of which gives you a standard setup for the default gw that the
regular dhclient can handle.

The IP you get is a 172.x.x.x and as soon as I turned on my gShield
firewall, name resolution stopped and the log started filling will dropped
packets from the nameservers (on 172.29.x.x). It took me a little while to
figure out that gShield drops all packets from 192.168.x.x 10.x.x.x and of
course 172.16/12. I use the first two networks often enough to recognise
them when I see them, but I didn't pick that 172.29.x.x belonged to
172.16/12. After that I was up and running.

It seems that coverage is not good. I couldn't get a signal at home, work
or RTI, but I could get it at the house of the friend who wants it set up.

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!