On Fri, 14 Feb 2003, Anthony Lieuallen wrote:

> > > >  > phone modem uplink), and the strange way the cable modem's
> > > >  > hardware seems to operate.  It assigns me a public address of
> > > >  > 209.122.183.50, while the default router is at 10.17.44.244 .
> > They should be allocating you an address in the same subnet as your
> > default gateway.  Either they are crazy or you didn't understand what
> > they intended.
>
> Yes, it seems to me to be a crazy setup as well.  The DHCP server as
> well as router seem to be within the modem, not at their end.  This is
> the only reason I can find for it using a private address.

Maybe the cable modem is doing NAT, too? Why not just clear all the
routes and addresses you've added, run "/etc/rc.d/dhclient
forcestart", and see what happens? Chances are, you'll get a 10.x.x.x
address, but people on the internet will be able to reach you as
209.122.183.50. Actually, I can ping that address from outside,
already, so it's obviously the external address of your cable modem.

For a persistent fix, all you have to do is

	echo dhclient=YES >> /etc/rc.conf

and reboot. If you have other interfaces that you don't want to use
"dhclient" on, use

	echo dhclient=YES dhclient_flags=\"eth0\" >> /etc/rc.conf

substituting for "eth0" the name of the interface that's looking
toward the cable modem.

Frederick