Building a testing server for pppoe / 2018-01-25

The new homeserver will have to run the same pppoe client setup as the current server. But I want to get the whole setup tested before the migration to minimize disruption.

Since I'm not going to get a free extra vdsl line and vdsl modem to test with and the complicated part is in the pppoe and ppp client part I decided to use a test vlan and set up a pppoe-server and ppp server on that vlan.

The pppoe server part is started with

# pppoe-server -I eth0.99 -C kzdoos -L 172.16.19.1 -R 172.16.21.19

And it's indeed available from the client:

# pppoe-discovery -I eth2
Access-Concentrator: kzdoos
Got a cookie: 84 39 c6 51 13 fe 32 00 2c 06 2a b4 38 0e 30 87 46 7b 00 00
--------------------------------------------------
AC-Ethernet-Address: 00:1f:c6:59:76:f6

So that part works. Next is to get an actual ppp session working over it.

The server part was a bit of work as I want to get the whole configuration including password checks. Server configuration in /etc/ppp/pppoe-server-options on the server system:

require-pap
lcp-echo-interval 10
lcp-echo-failure 2
hide-password
noipx
ipv6 ,

And the client configuration in /etc/ppp/peers/dray-vdsl:

user testkees
password topsecret
+pap
noauth
noipdefault
ipv6 ,
ipv6cp-use-persistent
defaultroute
persist
maxfail 0
noproxyarp
ipparam xs4all
lcp-echo-interval 10
lcp-echo-failure 6
pty "pppoe -I eth2"

Lots of options to make the setup exactly the same as the current. It took a lot of tries before password authentication was working. I could not get the client-side password in /etc/ppp/pap-secrets to work, but as show above the password in the ppp configuration did work.

And the setup in /etc/network/interfaces on the client just the same as the known configuration:

iface pppdray inet ppp
        provider dray-vdsl

And it works!

# ifup pppdray
Plugin rp-pppoe.so loaded.
# ifconfig ppp0
ppp0: flags=4305<UP,POINTOPOINT,RUNNING,NOARP,MULTICAST>  mtu 1492
        inet 172.16.21.45  netmask 255.255.255.255  destination 172.16.19.1
        inet6 fe80::5254:ff:fe3c:2014  prefixlen 10  scopeid 0x20<link>
        ppp  txqueuelen 3  (Point-to-Point Protocol)
        RX packets 9  bytes 252 (252.0 B)
        RX errors 0  dropped 0  overruns 0  frame 0
        TX packets 9  bytes 202 (202.0 B)
        TX errors 0  dropped 0 overruns 0  carrier 0  collisions 0
# ping -c 3 172.16.19.1
PING 172.16.19.1 (172.16.19.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 172.16.19.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.721 ms
64 bytes from 172.16.19.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.436 ms
64 bytes from 172.16.19.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.449 ms

--- 172.16.19.1 ping statistics ---
3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 2029ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.436/0.535/0.721/0.132 ms

The mtu is not yet what I want, but the session is alive.