ok, you got me, it's Bell Canada.
Anyways, I've been busy with a project I picked up to rewire an establishment; I'm doing it primarily for experience. While I know the theory behind proper home-run wiring, I have not had significant opportunity to actually DO IT. I wasn't going to pass up on this.
I had no idea what I was getting into. Word of advice: if you can pay someone to do the wiring for you, do it.
Anyways, as part of the package, I started looking around at other things that were not up to standards. The establishment doesn't need anything crazy, but I'm all about reliability, so getting older-generation Cisco equipment seems about right. I had a Cisco 881 in my lab setup that just didn't seem to do any of the things I wanted to do in my lab; so instead of hang onto this low-end router, I decided I would donate it to the cause.
The establishment in question is important to family, and therefore I am expected to give them certain.... special treatment. This 881 was going to be my ticket.
The config looked good, I set it up at home, but I have no DSL so I cannot test. I setup the WAN port (Fa4) for no ip address and setup the Dialer for PPPoE and put in the credentials. I then got onsite.
What I was presented with was a 2Wire modem/router .... I HATE these things. I start looking around for a guide on how to convert it to using bridge mode. So I reflash the firmware with one that will allow bridge mode, follow the directions step by step. I set the VCI and VDI, to 0/35 as instructed ( and as I recall from working with Bell in the past ) and perform the final steps of the configuration. The last step is to reboot to place the unit in bridge mode. So I do. and off we go.
Immediately after, I expect that the Cisco would pick up the WAN connection, dial the PPPoE and establish internet connectivity and everything would be amazing.... not so much.
I start troubleshooting, googling, maybe a different firmware, maybe I'm missing something in the config? I could only find configs for 1800 series and similar (I eventually found one for an 881... that was later) - all of them required the vpdn to include the following line:
vpdn accept-dialin protocol pppoe
I got stuck on getting the router to accept this command; I'm here to tell you that THIS COMMAND IS NOT NEEDED.
I eventually got fed up (after nearly 2 hrs of troubleshooting) and ran:
# debug pppoe
with all the pppoe debugging on, to my amazement, the Dialer was actually trying to initiate the connection. That means the configuration is complete enough for the Cisco to try. okay, so if we're trying and not getting a response, then what?
So I grabbed a random ethernet cable for a nearby (powered on) machine, and connected it directly to the modem; sure enough, I got an IP, I checked the management and sure enough the VCI and VDI were 0/100 (the default). Immediately I changed it back to 0/35 and hit save. seconds later, my console sprung to life with debug messages; I frantically typed to try to turn them all off.
Moments later, I rebooted everything to ensure the configuration would persist through power loss; it did.
2 + hours of troubleshooting because I had to use a custom firmware because Bell won't give us modems with bridge mode as an option....
