WAN/Internet type

Dist · 1 Nov 2008 at 16:19

Due to my netgear route randomly disconecting in the early hours of the morning im going to switch over to my wrt54gl router which will hopefully not reset in the morning as well.

The problem is up until this point ive sent the WAN/Internet setting to disabled, now that im going to start using it as my main router i know what to set its IP and MAC address to, but what do i set the internet type to? Tomato gives me the options of DHCP, PPPoE, Static, PPTP or L2TP. Im not sure which one i need to use for my Virgin Media cable connection. Also should i adjust any settings that are available, like MTU?

Up till now the netgear router i have been using was basicaly just plug in and its done, i didn't have to set which WAN/Internet type and all that stuff which is why i dont have much of a clue.

Also when i come to swap the routers, if i set my wrt54gl to use the same IP and MAC address as the netgear, then when i make the switch everything should continue to work without changing anything on the PCs shouldnt it? (Both routers wont be on at the same time, so duplicate IPs and MAC addresses wont matter)

Edit: I also just noticed that in the LAN settings, my linksys router had my netgear router as the gateway, when the linksys router takes that place, what should i put as the gateway? leave it at 192.168.0.1 (which will be itself), or leave it blank?

Phemo · 1 Nov 2008 at 16:33

Regular DHCP is what you'll need for cable. PPTP and L2TP are VPN options, static is for a static IP which you can't get on residential cable with Virgin and PPPoE is an ethernet connection where authentication is required. A standard MTU of 1500 will be fine.

As for the default gateway, when you set the router's WAN side to DHCP it should automatically fetch a default gateway address via DHCP so you won't need to put anything in.

If you give both routers the same address and just switch them out you should be ok except ARP caching may cause you an issue. This can result in a situation where a PC has the Netgear's MAC address stored in its ARP table against the gateway address so if you plug the Linksys in, it could still try to forward packets to the Linksys device's MAC. If this does happen however then simply removing the ethernet cable from the PC for a couple of seconds will clear the ARP cache (or you can use "arp -d *" from a command prompt).

In short:

1). DHCP
2). MTU of 1500
3). Router's default gateway should be handled automatically thanks to DHCP
4). It should be fine if you give them the same address and just have one plugged in at a time. If it doesn't work just reboot the PC or unplug/plug the PC's ethernet cable back in to clear its ARP cache

Dist · 1 Nov 2008 at 16:48

Thanks for the help Phemo.

I have one more question regarding port forwarding settings. Basicaly my netgear router didnt like port forwarding so i was forced to use uPnP for torrents, but with my linksys router i guess it will handle port forwarding properly, but should i use that or just use uPnP?

I know lots of people are agaisnt uPnP for security reasons, but my thinking is this. If i use uTorrent with uPnP, when i close uTorrent the port closes itself, and so the torrent connection requests that continue hours after uTorrent is closed will just be droped by the router. With port forwarding pointing my torrent point at my internet IP, even after i close uTorrent wouldnt the router keep forwarding all the connection requests to my PC? possibly causing more of a slowdown then the connection requests just being ignored at the router?

tolien · 1 Nov 2008 at 17:17

Instead of messing about with MAC addresses, power cycling the modem should be enough (power off, power on, wait for lights to steady, connect router).

As for uPnP versus port forwarding, it's six and half a dozen.

Dist · 1 Nov 2008 at 23:39

OK i have made the switch and the internet on it is working. Im checking the logs though and im seeing some things that ive never seen on the router logs before. Can anyone who understands it please say whats happening, if its a problem, and how to fix if it needs fixing please.

These are 2 examples of log entries that have been filling the log (note, i have stared out some IPs and part of the MAC address, in the log these are not starred out)

Nov 1 23:36:24 user.warn kernel: ACCEPT IN=br0 OUT=vlan1 SRC=192.168.0.2 DST=***.***.***.*** LEN=48 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=127 ID=13966 DF PROTO=TCP SPT=53172 DPT=80 WINDOW=8192 RES=0x00 SYN URGP=0 OPT (020405B401010402)

Nov 1 23:36:41 user.warn kernel: DROP IN=vlan1 OUT= MAC=ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:00:0e:39:**:**:**:**:**:**:**:**:** SRC=10.57.0.1 DST=255.255.255.255 LEN=328 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=255 ID=60655 PROTO=UDP SPT=67 DPT=68 LEN=308

From what i can gather, the type of log entry in my first example seems to be about me going to the stared out website. But why would the console log every connection? and why does it say user.warn? is it a warning about something? why warn me about going to a website that i intended to go to?

As for the 2nd type of log entry, i have no idea what that is about, i havnt seen a MAC address that long before. all i can see from it is that its making a UDP connection on port 68 by the looks of it.