This is all tech foo. Feel free to ignore this one…

So, software guy gets to play networking geek this evening. (Ignoring entirely the need to be up at 4am tomorrow)

So, I decided to move my tenuous DSL connection from the test laptop to the Airport Extreme base station. This seemed to work at first until I discovered that only one machine at a time was ‘allowed’ the connection. Each machine had to auth with a web page and then take control and release control of the “ethernet.”

Sigh, time to call tech support.

Tech support had me turn my modem into a Bridge modem. In other words, it no longer authenticated. The authentication in this modem is very interesting it does PPPoE. Then it looks at the MAC address of anything asking for net services and assigns one MAC the right to be called active. Active must give up the scepter before any other MAC can be active and thus have ethernet.

So, with the adsl modem now an ADSL bridge, I configured the Airport base station to do the PPPoE and then NAT/DHCP out internal fake addresses. Now multiple machines inside my LAN can see the net. Yay me.

Okay… All well and good. But…. I have a static IP address on the far end of the Modem. How do I get from the Static IP thru the modem to the machine that has a NAT address. Hmmn. Well, it would seem that from there we use Port Mapping. Basically I tell my Airport which ports to expect contact on. I then forward them to a machine inside the LAN. I could theoretically run two different web servers. Go to (My unreleased IP):80 to get to one machines server, go to :9080 to go to the other machine.

This worked. Now all I have to do is reroute my domains to point to the new static address.

And of course.. wake up in 3 1/2 hrs.

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