If you haven’t already please read part 1

W have our telnet connection up and running, we have the cards initalised and we know why we are here. Next up we need to get the VDSL profiles, line profiles and templates done.

First up we want to force H248 mode. H248 is covered here

protocol support h248

This has been the default so far for the systems I’ve looked at. I’m not overly sure WHAT the repercussions are of not setting this are but this is Huawei’s recommendation for VDSL. We now setup a line profile. When you hear the words “reset your IP profile” this is what is meant. These profiles decide how to handle your line and decide what connection speeds you’ll be allowed. A profile may have a max and min SNR and these are used to calculate what settings to use. We will only be adding one here but you could add multiples or just add them as needs be. The line profile and channel profile go together to make an overall picture of how that line will be handled. Huawei go into this in exhaustive detail here

vdsl line-profile quickadd 3 transmode 1 bitswap 2 2 adapt 2 2 snr 60 0 300 60 0 300 power-management 2 2 255 30 255 3 9 name VDSL LINE PROFILE 2

If you are copy and pasting you may want to pop this into notepad first, copy and pasting long lines *can* include line breaks too.

So what are we doing here? vdsl line-profile quickadd is our command. You *can* use add rather than quickadd and do this interactively. Specifying quickadd a profile number and pressing ? will help you build the line. Most of what’s here can stay as defaults unless you REALLY know what you are doing, the SNR parameters are specified after power-management and using the help system will help you build a different line profile if you know what you need. This line works well with the Huawei white modems and the HomeHub 5 so it follows this is a good setup for UK specific modems. And alternate line looks like :

vdsl line-profile quickadd 3 snr 60 0 300 60 0 300

Which is the one used by Hong Telecom. The first line is from Huawei themselves so I’d stick with that. Next up is the VDSL channel profile…

vdsl channel-profile quickadd 3 path-mode both interleaved-delay 8 2 inp 4 2 rate 128 100000 128 100000 100000 100000 rate-threshold 0 0 0 0 name VDSL CHANNEL PROFILE 3

This one is the profile that’s applied to a line, this is where you apply line rate limits etc. Again you have the option to do this interactively (recomended) or use ? to build the command line but most of what is above will do you. This is going in as profile 3 again there is a lot you should leave be but the rates are specified after the rate keyword. In order these are:

Minimum transmit rate downstream
Minimum reserved transmit rate downstream
Maximum transmit rate downstream
Minimum transmit rate upstream
Minimum reserved transmit rate
Maximum transmit rate upstream

The last bit is to stitch these together into a template….

vdsl line-template quickadd 3 line 3 channel1 3 100 100 name VDSL LINE TEMPLATE 3

Again you have the same two options to do this interactively or be guided. In this case we added template 3 using line template 3, channel template 3. the two numbers control line adaptation and can stay as they are, then lastly we give it a name. The documention does mention alarm profiles however we will stay with the default one for now. We just want these lines up.

We are working with VLAN 1, the default one for ease of use. We now need to make sure our GE and fibre ports are members of VLAN 1, they are by default but it can’t hurt. These are ports 0 and 1 respectively. Bear in mind the SFP port 0 is connected to the GE port so you only have 2 ports here

port vlan 1 0/0 0
port vlan 1 0/0 1

You’ll most likely get a warning about the ports already being members. Now comes the bit that will mess you up, especially if you follow the online examples. Pay careful attention to this next bit.

We mow need to tie each vdsl port to the VLAN we are working with. Here you have the ability to control exactly how traffic will be handled. We could split endpoints into multiple vlans, provide multiple vlans to the endpoint, eg a CCTV and Telephony VLAN and direct these to actual VLANs on the outgoing trunks. A vlan MUST exist and be routed to an external interface before traffic from the remote will flow. Vlan ? will get you started on this part. So our command here is:

service-port 0 vlan 1 vdsl mode ptm 0/1/0 multi-service user-vlan 100

If you want to omit the vlan management (this gave me some issues) use:

service-port 0 vlan 1 vdsl mode ptm 0/2/1

So we are setting up service port 0, you can have 1999 of these so even with the number of channels on this unit you wont run out soon. Our destination vlan is 1, the default vlan and we are in ptm mode. Next is our port ID, we covered this in part one. So we are looking at frame 0, board 1, port 0 here. which is the first VDSL channel on board 1. Multi-service as we want to be able to embed multiple tags. You can ignore this, however if you want to use BT surplus kit or equipment setup for use in the UK you will want to set this. User VLAN specifies the vlan we are going to use.

Many people setting up VDSL modems in the UK will run accross a modem that syncs but no traffic flows. By default *most* UK providers use a VLAN which is why we enabled multi service above and set the VLAN as 101 which is what most use. You can of course set this as anything you want or even not set multi-service at all. By doing so your modems and routers will need to be configured specifically for this setup, the beauty of setting this is that all the off the shelf, cheap/free ISP provided kit will work right off the bat with no modifications especially the white Huawei and ECI modems.

The bad news is you’ll need to do this on a per port basis, have fun with that. Last make damn sure you do

save configuration

If you plug in to that VDSL port now and all is well traffic will be flowing. You’ll note there is no authentication going on here. Generally what would happen is each port gets mapped either to a specific vlan and then this vlan is forwarded to a PPPOE server either in bulk or a per port vlan. Typically a carrier would use per port and something called stacking so that authentication and traffic are unique to each user. In this setup we have done you *could* snoop traffic at an endpoint.

Now there is an issue here I haven’t fixed, I can’t get the second SFP port running. This is do do with working as part of a GPON solution which means there’s only 1Gb or 10Gb of traffic routing here and thats only if your infrastructure is capable of handling 10Gbit. A 10GBit capable card in the firewall itself would be one way to do this but watch your PCI-E bandwidth if you are planning on getting close. 10Gb allows for 100 100Mb channels concurrently, which *should* be enough.

UPDATE

Changing the port mode is stupidly easy. After trying some more things I ended up with a non routing system again, so I dug round, fixed the issue and stumbled on the solution. In my case this did nuke all the settings and it does warn you of this!

port mode 0/0/0 ge

Will put port 0 and the GE port into plain old Gigabit ethernet mode. This is the default. To take 1 out of GPON and into GE just do:

port mode 0/0/1 ge

Port now will happily play with a normal SFP now. Dont forget to save!