Help in connecting using PPPoE

Hi there, I'm a newbie with OpenWrt. I was able to set it on my tp-link Archer C7. It is working smoothly as a Dumb AP. In this forum I asked how could I make the most out of OpenWrt and someone said:

After some googling I was able to found a tutorial to do so. Lucky enough it is about my modem and my ISP. Here is the link (sorry is in Spanish):

If you want to take a peek specifically look for the part that says: " CONFIGURACIÓN DEL ONT EN MODO PUENTE (BRIDGE)" (Set ONT in bridge mode)

So I have done everything on the list, but the confusing part for me is setting the OpenWrt router accordingly. This is what needs to be done following the tutorial (that I don't know how to do on OpenWrt):

For the example they used FIRMWARE ASUSWRT-MERLIN FOR NETGEAR R7000 (the post is from 2016) here the steps (translation from Spanish to English done by me):

  • Go to Advanced settings/ WAN / Internet connection
  • WAN connection type: PPPoE

  • Enable WAN: Yes

  • Enable NAT: Yes

  • PPP Username: I have this

  • Password: I also have this

  • Disconnect after inactivity for a period of time (in seconds): 0

I tried to do it on LuCi with the little knowledge I have and despite LAN and WLAN remained operative, no internet connection was possible.

I cannot test over this whenever I can, because doing so means to take down internet for everyone here, hence I need to do it whether really early in the morning or really late. So if you can give me an idea let me, first of all, tell you thank you. And second, that it will take a little while for me to answer due to the circumstances.

I can run console commands via SSH if you need me to.
I would also like to reset OpenWrt because I've tweaking with it a lot so it is possible that I messed something. If there is a way please let me know.

If I need to enable WAN on my OpenWrt router, does that means that the ONT should be linked to the OpenWrt router WAN port? It is currently connected to a port on the LAN side of the router.

Thanks for reading.

Resetting to defaults is under System-Backup/Flash Firmware. Do that. And connect the modem to the WAN port.

Go to Network-Interfaces-WAN and pull down where it says DHCP Client to change the protocol to pppoe instead. After you click you're sure, there will be boxes to enter the username and password. You can leave everything else at defaults.

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This worked. But just two final things:

  • Now I cannot access the ISP modem. In the OpenWrt rotuer IP table I don't see it. Is it possible to "make ISP modem visible" to OpenWrt router? This is not critical, because I highly doubt that I now need to enter to the ISP modem ever again, and if that's the case then I just link my PC directly to it.
    But I'm just curious, can this be achieve?
  • As mentioned everything is working but then why when I look into the interfaces the WAN interface is still red? is this normal?

It's the color of WAN firewall zone, not internet status.

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How have you accessed ISP modem before using OpenWRT router?

Before I had a Dumb AP / Access Point Only configuration. The DHCP server was on the ISP modem and it was connected to one port on the LAN side of the OpenWrt router. I was able to enter to both devices under this addresses:
192.168.0.1 -> ISP modem
192.168.0.2 -> OpenWrt router.

After this new setup the DCHP server is now on the OpenWrt, and the ISP modem links to the OpenWrt router WAN port (among others) this is what I got:

192.168.0.2 -> OpenWrt router.
??? -> ISP modem.

I would like to be able to enter the ISP modem without connecting / disconnecting anything at all. I just want to know if this is possible (if it is I'll find the way to do it).

Thanks for reading.

I don't understand, why you need to configure PPPoE on your OpenWRT-router. It should connect directly to ISP-modem with dhcp-client, e.g. In this case ISP-modem should be accessed via 192.168.0.1 from OpenWRT-router.

When operating in pppoe mode, the ISP modem is usually (but not always) also still running its web configuration service and listening for TCP at 192.168.0.1. With the CLI, you can simply add an IPv4 to the WAN interface (e.g. eth0):
ip addr add 192.168.0.2/24 dev eth0
This is not a permanent change. It will persist until reboot or restart the network. I am not sure if it is possible to do this from LuCI.

If this works you can ping the modem at 192.168.0.1 or access its web page from a PC on the LAN. Your Internet usage will still be pppoe.
Note that as usual for a routed setup, your OpenWrt LAN IP subnet range must be different from the modem and not overlap it.

Thank you very much, so this means that I'm OK.

I did it from a suggestion to make the most out of OpenWrt. According to that suggestion I need to make my ISP-modem the least smart while making my OpenWrt device the most smart possible, that's the reason I'm doing this, because now I would be able to control traffic and hence blocking ads, set a central VPN for all my network and so on, or at least this is what I understand from what I've been reading on the topic. But this is the first step to accomplish all of that.

I have to say that this has given me a NAT type 2 for my PS4 (it was 3 before), I don't know if I'm suggested or what but I feel that the game experience is better. I play Overwatch, Blizzard has done a great job hiding the lag. So when you are lagging you notice that your character is moving slower than usual. Before, it was normal to notice a lag at the beginning of the match or when re spawning. After this setup I played (just for testing purposes) and found no lag during my game. It's premature to say that it's perfect, but it started really well. I played like 4 games and they were really fluent. No complaints from me. Then I played COD MW remastered edition (just for testing purposes) and it also went very well I stayed positive (more kills than deaths) and this is huge because I suck at that game (even though I love it)

So what about access 192.168.0.1 from OpenWRT-router?

I need to test @mk24's last answer, but I cannot do it right now, I have to go. I'll test later and post the results. Thank you all for the support.

On an Archer C7 the wan physical device should be eth0.2.

If I do this I got a "The connection has timed out" page.

Thanks for your help. I'm going to leave it as it is right now. If I want to check the ISP modem I have to link directly to it. I can live with that as now most of the settings will be handled directly on OpenWrt router.

A work around to be able to look at both devices at the same time is to link directly to the ISP modem and connect to the WiFi provided by the OpenWrt modem.

Please, provide output of ifconfig command from OpenWRT-router.

Can I just copy and paste it? or is there any sensitive info that I should remove before I post it?

Redact your MAC addresses and public IP.

I thought that ip addr add also installs a route to the new network but it might not. I don't have a suitable network set up to test that right now.

Thanks, I'm on it.

OK here is it:

br-lan    Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr MAC ADDRESS 1
          inet addr:192.168.0.2  Bcast:192.168.0.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: MAC ADDRESS 2::1/60 Scope:Global
          inet6 addr: MAC ADDRESS 3:d5b8/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:2506188 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:4527205 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:212058788 (202.2 MiB)  TX bytes:5669451181 (5.2 GiB)

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr MAC ADDRESS 1
          inet6 addr: MAC ADDRESS 3:d5b8/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:33556842 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:65 frame:0
          TX packets:31796815 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:3729245984 (3.4 GiB)  TX bytes:4206564595 (3.9 GiB)
          Interrupt:4

eth0.1    Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr MAC ADDRESS 1
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:2301059 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:4165910 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:165361229 (157.7 MiB)  TX bytes:5225045591 (4.8 GiB)

eth0.2    Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr MAC ADDRESS 4
          inet6 addr: MAC ADDRESS 3:d5b9/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:22831802 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:13375043 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:28026957283 (26.1 GiB)  TX bytes:2661537958 (2.4 GiB)

lo        Link encap:Local Loopback
          inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
          inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:65536  Metric:1
          RX packets:35845 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:35845 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1
          RX bytes:3407401 (3.2 MiB)  TX bytes:3407401 (3.2 MiB)

pppoe-wan Link encap:Point-to-Point Protocol
          inet addr:PUBLIC IP 1  P-t-P:SOME IP 1  Mask:255.255.255.255
          UP POINTOPOINT RUNNING NOARP MULTICAST  MTU:1492  Metric:1
          RX packets:1572012 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:932535 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:3
          RX bytes:2064289237 (1.9 GiB)  TX bytes:74009432 (70.5 MiB)

wlan0     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr MAC ADDRESS 5
          inet6 addr: MAC ADDRESS 3:d5b7/64 Scope:Link
          inet6 addr: MAC ADDRESS 3:d5b7/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:171264 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:308370 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:43334698 (41.3 MiB)  TX bytes:373563085 (356.2 MiB)

About this:

I didn't do the test, after entering both devices I noticed that none of them is able to see each other. So I just left there, because from now on I will be rarely visiting the ISP modem, while I have OpenWrt router at hand.