I have been having some dropouts on my Westnet ADSL 2+. The dropouts have been really bad in the last few days, and I decided to fix things. I use a Billion Bipac 5102 ADSL modem. This is one of the cheapest on the market, and aparently one of the best. It was able to go with full speed ADSL 1 as well as ADSL 2 and 2+. And it has been fairly good at doing this. Apart from the dropouts.

So I downloaded the updates from the Billion Web Site. The Billion router does not have the ability to backup the settings so I wrote the important settings in my notebook, and uploaded the settings. Then following the instructions I gave the modem a full reset. Well, that is what I did after I could only get the status page to come up. So then I followed the instructions and to do the basic settings, and my laptop connected to the modem started working. Then I needed to set up the DMZ settings.

Well, there is a step missing. I needed to change the IP address of the modem. That probably took the best part of an hour the first time. If you do this incorrectly you need to start again.

That is where things got fun. You see, I like to send all my traffic to 192.168.2.30; but the modem is 192.168.3.249, and there is a gateway at 192.168.3.1 to route packets through. But if you went to enter the gateway address of 192.168.3.1 into the routing interface it would decode this as being an external address. There was no way to make it route to a internal address.

After many hours I worked out I should just point the DMZ to 192.168.3.1, and have the NAT use this address on the firewall rather than 192.168.2.30. But to get this far I needed to work out that I could ignore the Virtual Server configuration in the settings.

The only way I worked this all out was having one laptop to monitor the operations of packets coming in, and the other to configure the modem. This happened at 11pm after starting at about 7pm.

Then I needed to get the packets going outgoing. This took another hour – and I needed to set up masquerade on the firewall. This did not totally work. Actually this did not work at all, so I unplugged the network and just had my laptop and things did not work. I found I had turned RIP routing on. Turning this off fixed things around midnight