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easyfind and PPPoE

Got problems with your B2 or B3? Share and get helped!
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arigead
Posts: 14
Joined: 02 Aug 2012, 16:29

easyfind and PPPoE

Post by arigead »

There are a few threads on here about easyfind, however I've been unable to find a suitable solution. I've been testing a domain so have, up till now, been using DDNS but now am moving that domain to real web hosting and no longer have a web domain to connect to my B3. So I'm back to easyfind.

My problem is that my B3 is connected to a DSL Modem. The B3 has been brilliant as it's my Router and terminates the PPPoE Session from my ISP. As a result my ethernet interfaces eth0 and eth1 don't have an IP Address but rather ppp0 is the real link to the outside world. If I use the admin web interface on the B3 and trigger an update of easyfind then the myownb3 is updated and works great. The B3 however does not pick up changes in the ppp0 IP Address. So if I'm away from home and the IP Address is changed by the ISP I'm cut off.

The easy solution would be to create a cron entry for the easyfind scrip but I'm not sure which script to call. None that I've tried from the command line have worked. The init.d/easyfind script won't run as there's already a twisted PID. Does anybody know what a good solution would be?
Gordon
Posts: 1461
Joined: 10 Aug 2011, 03:18

Re: easyfind and PPPoE

Post by Gordon »

The easyfind updater does not actually check addresses on either eth0 (WAN) or eth1 (LAN). There is however a dhcp hook that will call the easyfind updater if eth0 receives a new lease. This didn't work for everyone however, as many people are running their B3 behind an ISP supplied router. I myself used to run it that way because I couldn't figure out what was going on in that box (turned out be VLANs - tricky bastards). The easyfind service is designed to access a specific web page every minute and this will return you actual (NATted) IP address. Unfortunately many people have had issues with that service somehow not actually doing the update and I for one am completely in the dark why they have issues while others don't.

The button on the B3 admin page calls a perl script /usr/lib/web-admin/easyfind.pl and you can simply run that same script from command line. Since you have PPPoE on your B3, I guess you know your way around in Linux and you could try to adapt the dhcp hook to work on ppp0 in stead of eth0. Another way is to use cron to periodically run the update script, although it is a lot nicer to verify whether it actually requires updating first. Since your B3 is not NATted this should be simple enough by just checking the address on ppp0.
arigead
Posts: 14
Joined: 02 Aug 2012, 16:29

Re: easyfind and PPPoE

Post by arigead »

Thanks a million Gordon! That's really helpful. I think I might disable easyfind as I'm not behind a nat and I can simply see my public IP address without accessing an external web page. Then I'll do one of your suggestions of either getting hooks into DHCP or write a script that just reads the IP Address of ppp0. I'll have a go at the DHCP route. How hard can that be.
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