Internode HFC NBN on OpenBSD

This is just a short note… today we finally made the jump across to the NBN. We’re running hybrid-fibre coax here in The Gap, and right now the HFC NTD is running off mains power (getting that onto solar will be a future project).

I already had my OpenBSD 6.6 router running through the ADSL terminating the PPPoE link. The router itself is a PC Engines APU2, which features 3 Ethernet ports. em0 faces my DMZ and internal network. em1 is presently plugged into the ADSL modem/router, and em2 was spare.

Thus, my interface configuration looked like this:

# /etc/hostname.em0
inet 10.20.50.254 255.255.255.0
inet6 alias 2001:44b8:21ac:70f9::fe 64
# … and a stack of !route commands for the internal subnets

# /etc/hostname.em1
up

# /etc/hostname.pppoe0
# pppoedev em1: ADSL
# pppoedev vlan2: NBN
inet 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.255 NONE \
        pppoedev em1 authproto chap \
        authname user@example.com \
        authkey mypassword up

… and of course /etc/pf.conf was configured with appropriate rules for my network. For the NBN, I read up that VLAN #2 was required, so I set up the following:

# /etc/hostname.em2  
up

# /etc/hostname.vlan2                                                                                                
vnetid 2
parent em2
up 

I then changed /etc/hostname.pppoe0 to point to vlan2 instead of em1. When the NBN NTD got installed, I tried this out… no dice, there was PADI frames being sent, but nada, nothing.

Digging around, I needed to set the transmit priority, so I amended /etc/hostname.vlan2:

# /etc/hostname.vlan2                                                                                                
vnetid 2
parent em2
txprio 1    # ← ADD THIS
up 

Bingo! I was now seeing PPPoE traffic. However I wasn’t out of the woods, nothing behind the router was able to get to the Internet. Turns out pf needs to be told what transmit priority to use. I amended my /etc/pf.conf:

# Scrub incoming traffic
match in all scrub (no-df)

# Set pppoe0 priority
match out on $external set prio 1  # ← ADD THIS

# Block all traffic by default (paranoia)
block log all
#block all

That was sufficient to get traffic working. I’m now getting the following out of SpeedTest.

The link is theoretically supposed to be 50Mbps… but whatever. The primary concern is that it didn’t suddenly drop to 0Mbps when the plug got pulled in September. I’ll check again when things are “quieter” (it’ll be peak periods now), but as far as I’m concerned, this is a matter of ensuring continued service.

It already outperforms the ADSL2+ link (which was about 15Mbps / 2Mbps). Next stop will be to port the old telephone number over, but that can wait another day!

Tags: internodenbnnbn-hfcopenbsdopenbsd-pf