Jonathan Thornburg wrote: > The firewall/router/nat box is (will be when I get this setup) > an old 486 laptop with 2 pcmcia ethernet cards, running 3.9-stable. > (Yes, I've ordered a CD; until it arrives I'm using 3.8-stable.) > > I already have the (external) DSL modem, and from talking to other > Unix-savvy customers of my ISP (arcor.de), their setup is that the > DSL modem talks pppoe to me (in this case to my firewall/router/nat > box). From looking at the FAQ section 6, it seems I have two basic > options available doing this in OpenBSD: pppoe(4) in the kernal, and > pppoe(8) in userland. My question is, what are the relative > advantages/disadvantages of these? > > The obvious tradeoff is performance: I expect pppoe(8) to be slower > due to the extra kernel/user-space crossings for each packet. My > ADSL is 6M bits/sec downstream, 0.5M upstream. > > But are there other significant differences in > * support for pppoe features? > * ease of configuration? > * reliability?
As someone who also use an old laptop for this purpose, a 486, PCMCIA cards and user mode pppoe will likely not allow you to achieve your full 6Mbps speeds. Since I've never used user mode pppoe, I can't comment on the differences, but as a kernel mode user I can say the configuration is very simple and well documented and the "reliability issues" that plagued 3.7 are gone in 3.8.
