christian johansson wrote:
After reading all responses to my previous post (thanks guys!), I think its
pretty clear I was barking up the wrong tree, not looking at the ready built
soekrises :)
So on to my next question, what to use for an internal dsl card.
After googling around, it seems clear there are no modern / reliable
mini-pci dsl modem cards, but there are some PCI ones. The preferred one
seems to be the Sangoma S518 PCI ADSL Modem.
I've read both that this card does not work in openbsd any longer (ever
since they changed the form factor in the latest revision) but others say it
does too work.
Does anyone here know for sure if this internal dsl modem card works in
openbsd?
I read posts from one guy who claimed he had put it in a soekris net4801, so
assuming he was using an adapter, does anyone know here if this is a safe
approach? Can the soekris deliver enough power through the mini-pci bus? I
realize doing this would require modding the soekris box, but thats ok.
Some other guy said in a post that internal dsl cards are like winmodems,
shoving most of the work over to the host machine. Is this true? For a card
going for over $100 this seems pretty strange.
There is much confusion.
I own this card. In the new form factor (identical, electrically to the old) it is a
half-height PCI card, which ought to work in a Soekris. I use it in a 2U rack system, so I
don't know for sure.
The driver will compile (or at least on 3.9 it did) and try to run. I was never able to
resolve an authentication problem I had under OBSD. It may have been a problem specific to
my site/ISP. I was able to use it successfully under Linux using the userspace PPPd with
the 518 card acting like a "dumb" DSL modem spouting serial PPP data to a pseudo-TTY. This
is how I use it today, though I prefer OBSD for firewall/router use. The OBSD S518 driver
doesn't offer the "dumb serial" mode that the Linux version does, so I wasn't able to use
this workaround.
I think the hardware is excellent, and I am thrilled at the support of open source
OSes. Unfortunately, market demands do not allow Sangoma to officially support the S518
under OBSD anymore. Unofficially, they still offer it on their web site, and have accepted
and integrated patches from the community.
I don't know if anyone else has been pursuing this since I had to abandon the work and
let my router run Linux. I think the Sangoma card is one of the best out there, and I'd
like to see it supported better. The driver is open source, and there is an (old) version
of it integrated into the OBSD kernel. I doubt this old driver is something you want to
mess with though.
There is some sort of special-purpose processor on the card (in a big FPGA), and it
does some of the work. Some of the protocol work is done in the driver itself, and not all
of the "internal" code is accessible through open source. I don't have a problem with
that, as long as it works.
I'd like to talk/work with other S518 owners to see if we can't do a better job of
making this device accessible under OBSD. The manufacturer has been very open with info
and code, but can't justify their own guys doing much debugging on it anymore.
The advantages of having your DSL manifest as an interface directly on your router
(without the extra hop) are enormous, from a traffic shaping perspective, so I highly
recommend the Sangoma card for this purpose.
Christian
--
Chris 'Xenon' Hanson | Xenon @ 3D Nature | http://www.3DNature.com/
"I set the wheels in motion, turn up all the machines, activate the programs,
and run behind the scenes. I set the clouds in motion, turn up light and
sound,
activate the window, and watch the world go 'round." -Prime Mover, Rush.
