I Know The Guy Who Owns This Place

Strangely, one of the initial problems we’ve been having with Qwest’s 20MB/s DSL was getting logged into Windows Messenger. This was strange because the service is actually “Qwest with Window Live” so I figured it had to just work.

After many hours debugging, I traced it down to the combination of the Actiontec M1000 modem from Qwest and my D-Link DIR-655 Wireless N router. With those two together, I could get out to the Internet seemingly fine in Firefox, Skype and AIM, but could not connect to Windows Live. I tried many configs, but really didn’t make much progress. I figured there had to be a double NAT going on (since the Actiontec M1000 has a NAT built-in).

I finally decided to swap in my Apple Airport Extreme instead of the D-Link. The problem I needed to solve was making sure I could still do DHCP reservations so that my internal LAN IP addresses stayed fixed. After a long, confused call with Qwest techsupport (she clearly had no idea what I was asking about) and a fair amount of Googling, I finally determined that my initial guess was correct: the Actiontec M1000 does not support DHCP reservations. You get whatever IP address the modem’s DHCP server decides to give you. Well, that didn’t work for me since I want to have my NAS always on the same IP address for port mapping.

The magic solution was this:

• Call Qwest to get my PPP password (you can get the user name on the M1000 screen)
• Configure the M1000 to be in RFC1483 Transparent Bridging Mode
• Reboot the Airport Extreme to get the PPPoE option you need
• Configure the Apple Airport Extreme with the PPPoE username and password from the M1000

Voila! You’ll get connected with just a single NAT (the Apple router) which also supports DHCP reservations.   

So now, things are in great shape (I think):

• Windows Messenger is now running just fine over the Qwest connection.
• Amazon’s image downloads and Twitter’s image downloads are now working perfectly as well. I’m sure fixing the image downloads was related, but I have no idea why. They weren’t downloading under the D-Link config.
• Back to My Mac is even configured via the Apple router so I can get to my Macs while at work on the road. This was a total bonus feature.

~ by bryan on April 25, 2009.