BYO Linux Router To Australia's Fibre Network

An anonymous reader writes "Run a Linux router to connect your ADSL service but worried about what will happen when the Australian Government rolls out fibre broadband to your house or business? Worry no more. It turns out that customers on Australia's new National Broadband Network will be able to run their own homebrew Linux router to connect to the network and route traffic any way they please."

As one would expect nowadays, but ...

[wilfie]

Virgin in the UK used to refuse support until you connected a Mac or Windows box directly. Routers were 'not supported'.

Re:What's the story?

[Techman83]

I know a few the tech support guys at my Provider, they're used to me sending logs from my BSD based firewall. A fair percentage of Modem/Routers are linux based anyway. The only real difference here is the termination is no longer a modem provided by the customer. You'll still need something that talks PPPoE to authenticate to the network, be it a hardware based router or a plethora of software based distro [wikipedia.org]

Re:What's the story?

[WarJolt]

my dd-wrt router does pppoe. Who wants a power hungry diy router when cheap and cheerful works well too?

Re:As one would expect nowadays, but ...

[Zontar The Mindless]

Telstra used to have the same requirement. IIRC, you couldn't get online at all except by using their crappy connect-ware on a Windows box (and cloning the MAC address to your router didn't work).

I was sooo glad when I moved into an area where I could get service from Internode -- "If it speaks TCP/IP and it works for you, it works for us, too." Heaven.

So, yes, this is news.

This is news?

[Osty]

Doesn't every ISP allow you to do this? Your ISP provides with a modem of the correct type (DSL or cable) and you provide your own router. If they give you a modem that is also a router, you can turn that off or ask them for a plain old modem. With many ISPs, at least in the US, you can even provide your own modem.

I've been running my own Linux router for the past 12 years across multiple ISPs, from T1 providers back in college to DSL providers to Comcast, and have never had a problem doing so. The tech support may be clueless if you call ("Did you reboot your router?" "Let me do that ...

Re:Jews for Nerds!

[Zontar The Mindless]

All Jews possess the following features: ... shitty taste in dental hygiene.

(Shouldn't rise to the bait, but...)

Right, this *totally* explains my Jewish dentist redoing all my upper teeth last year so that I could actually start smiling instead of cringing -- at a 40% discount off his listed fees -- because I'd obviously needed the work done quite badly for years.

Oh, did I mention that he's an *Iraqi* Jew?

Thanks for sorting that out for me, AC!

Re:What's the story?

[jrumney]

If you're running any servers, you have the power hungry box anyway.

Re:This is news?

[kestasjk]

I'm in Australia (Perth), I have my own modem and use a FreeBSD gateway (so that I can use PF for firewalling and traffic queuing; for Skype and gaming at the same time), which I've been using for ~6 years and over two ISPs.

So to answer your question; no, this isn't news. If the new proposed national broadband network didn't allow a router of choice that would be news, because that would be absolutely ridiculous.

Re:This is news?

[cheater512]

This skips the router.

Ethernet cable out of the wall goes straight to your Linux box. Nothing inbetween.

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