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What a dumb sounding title. You’d think something like this would be easy. Sorry, I’m slightly bitter at AT&T after a week’s worth of phone calls to get my DSL up and running and to get a router on the network. Even after threatening to cancel service, after telling them that I don’t know anyone who has broadband and doesn’t have a router, and that I’d tried two routers that wouldn’t work, AT&T still wanted to transfer me to their ‘premium’ tech support service for my third party router to get more money out of me. Netgear? Linksys? Ever heard of these? Deaf ears.

I tried spoofing my computer’s MAC address but it wouldn’t work. I tried using my router to dial the PPPoE connection but that didn’t work either. Yet when I plugged any computer directly into the modem it worked fine.

AT&T told me to ‘bridge’ my modem and have the router dial the PPPoE connection. Fail. It didn’t work at all. The solution is easy enough, if any of them had access to the right information: Keep the modem dialing the PPPoE connection. Then, plug in AT&T’s DNS into the router:

Primary DNS: 68.94.156.1
Secondary DNS: 68.94.157.1

and that’s it! You’re good to go. If you run a computer with a static IP, plug those DNS entries into its network settings as well.

I tried using OpenDNS first, which worked ok, but it was a little slower, it messed with my VPN, and I didn’t like seeing advertisements when I typed in addresses wrong. This solution works best.

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