Subj : FidoNews 42:18 [01/07]: General Articles To : All From : FidoNews Robot Date : Mon May 05 2025 00:24:42 ================================================================= GENERAL ARTICLES ================================================================= Configuring my own fiberglass modem/router part 1 By Michiel van der Vlist, 2:280/5555 It has been well over a year now that I have fiber glass installed in my house. There is a lot of competition at the moment. Several parties are trying to get a foothold in the market. As a result priority lies on getting as many flags planted in as many households in The Netherlands as soon as possible. Quality of the provided service comes later. So I was a bit reluctant in canceling my subscription with the cable company when the fibre connection was delivered. I thought let's keep them both for the moment just to be sure. And while I had two connections I figured I might as well get the most of it by providing dual homing for my Fidonet connection. So I installed an extra network card on my Fidonet PC. It took some tuning and I found it worked best when I configured the same DNS servers for both connections. No idea why, but that was my experience. It turned out keeping the cable connection for a while was a good decision. The modem/router (Nokia XS-2426G-B) from the fiber company has problems with port forwarding and IPv6 pinholing. I reported these issues but after well over a year it still has not been fixed. It does not seem to have priority. So I decided it was time to take action. My first step was to change providers. The company that installed and exploits the fiber is not the same company that provides the connection. In fact there are several companies that offer connection on the fibre network. One of those had an interesting offer for internet only. So I changed. Unfortunatley that did not solve my problem. They gave me the same Nokia XS-2426G-B with the very same firmware version. And of course the same problems with port forwarding and IPv6 pinholing. Fortunately internet providers here are by law required to facilitate customers that want to use their own modems and routers. So I decided to go for the adventure and forget about buggy stuff from the provider and get my own modem and router. And I have to give it to them, that contrary to the cable company that fought legal battles for many years to block it, the fiber internet provider, Delta, loyally cooperates to facilitate the use of customer owned modems and routers. There are a few snags though. For starters any change to the admininstrative parameters in the connection can only be made with the original modem/router connected. Think about upgrade to a higher speed or... changing from CGNAT to having a public IPv4 address. Apparently the new fiber companies have problems getting IPv4 addresse for the fast growing number of their new customers. So about a year ag they stopped issuing public IPv4 adresses to their customers. They offer a CGNAT address in the range 100.64.0.0/10. That is OK for most customers but not for those that run their own servers. Fortunately they still have enough IPv4 to accommodate costomers thats need a public routable IPv4 address. Just ask for it by subscribing to the service "dynamic IP". Oddly enough they use the term "fixed address" for a CGNAT address in the 192.168.100.0/10 range. That CGNAT address is indeed fixed. Once issued it does not change any more. Whatever... For now this service is free of charge. That may change in the future. Anyway, I got a public IPv4 address in a few hours. Next step is to have your own "modem" registered. They publish a list of equipment that is compatible with their network. The list is quit long but most of what is on the list is not available on the market. Only a handfull remain. But if your "modem" is on the list all you hav to do is connect it, call them and give then the PON-id. That is it. My choice fell on the easy available Nokia XS-010X-Q which from now on I shall refer to as the ONT. ( Optical Network Terminator ) Shortly after The ONT was connected the power led started flashing for a couple of minutes indicating that a firmware upgrade is in progress. That was one of the reasons for choosing the Nokia. It is the only one of the available alternatives that automatically gets firmware upgrade from Delta. When the power and PON led are steady green it is time for the next step. Connect something to the ONT and get data flowing. The ONT is just a bridge, it has no router functions. But it has a user interface accesable on 192.168.100.1. No DHCP server so to access it I configure the laptop that I use for my point 1 and other experiments to have a fixed address of 192.168.100.2. Then I could acces the ONT's web interface. There is very little that one can do but I could check that the latest firmware was installed and that the optical signal level wa OK. I reconfigured my laptop to get its address via DHCP and I configured VLAN 100. The latter is required for an internet connection over the fiber, They use VLANs to seperate the various services. Fortunately this is easy in Windows with many network card drivers. Delta uses VLAN 100 for consumer internet. VLAN 102 for TV and 105 for a bussines connection. Other providers on the fiber use different VLAN numbers. When I did that I got an IP address (4 and 6) and I had an inernet connection. I made an outgoing binkp connection from my point 1. Then I knew that the ONT and all beyond was OK. Well, actually this is not exactly the order of things that happened but for the sake of this article it will do. I will save the trial and error steps that led to this result for the follow up article that will be about the rest of my adventure. The part of connecting and configuring a router. So... To be continued... ----------------------------------------------------------------- --- Azure/NewsPrep 3.0 * Origin: Home of the Fidonews (2:2/2.0) .