[svlug] DSL provider (raw bandwidth <-> pacbell?)

[Deirdre Saoirse]

On Sat, 24 Mar 2001, Aaron Lehmann wrote:

> Personally, I'm happy I went with Covad/Speakeasy. At least I haven't
> seen the latter on fuckedcompany.com yet. The price I pay is
> competitive with Pacbell's offerings, but I am allowed and encouraged
> to run servers, have (up to 8) static IP addresses, and don't have to
> deal with this PPPoE obfuscation I keep hearing about (can someone
> explain that once and for all? I cannot understand the life of me why
> someone would want to run a perfectly good, ethernet-based, persistant
> connection over PPP). Anyway, Speakeasy is also nice enough to listen
> to my requests about small things like reverse DNS. I highly reccomend
> them, but only to intelligent, self-sufficient customers ;-).

I can think of a number of reasons why PPPoE might be good for certain
applications.

1) If you're not "logged in," then in theory you can't be attacked either.
If you're running no services, this seems like a potential upside,
especially since this might close the default open (as in masqerade
anything, including people who just want to be masqueraded from OUTSIDE)
wingates I'm tired of playing whack-a-mole with on home.com.

2) If you don't want everyone in the house who has access to the computer
to have access to the net connection by default.

3) If you're running something that needs to be logged in. An example
might be a device (such as a TiVo) that needs to ride a connection and log
in via ppp -- in other words, it needs to be on some other logical network
than the one you're physically on.

All that said, I'd never want my DSL to be PPPoE.

--
_Deirdre   NEW Stash-o-Matic: http://fuzzyorange.com  http://deirdre.net
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