I was digging around the net for a solution to have shared net access on my Haweui MT841 modem (ADSL Gateway). It has 4 ethernet ports (that can be used as a switch), 1 USB and WIFI (which apparantly requires a separate PCMCIA card to get it working). My laptop doesn’t have an ethernet interface (I know its high time to upgrade) but it has an USB interface and I wanted the ADSL modem to act as a switch and also wanted ICS. Microsoft ICS(Internet Connection Sharing) will not work as the ethernet interface of the PC is used to connect using bsnl broadband and the same interface is used by PPPoe (PPP over ethernet). I serached the forums of http://vinuthomas.com, and found about wireless configuration of MT841. With that info and after saving the present configuration, I deleted all the PVCs and added a new PVC0 with PPPoe, gave the username and password. The BSNL DNS ip address for DNS was given and I also enabled DHCP on the modem. After saving the settings and rebooting the modem, it automatically connected to the net and I could access the net from my laptop and desktop.
Lessons learnt.
ADSL modem configuration in a bridged as well as PPPoe configuration is not all that difficult.
The USB port is just like a USB to ethernet converter
The initial configuration that BSNL used to give was in a bridged fashion without PPPoe from the PC but later installations used PPoe from the PC.
Apparantly RASPPPoe lets you do Microsoft ICS and is more efficient than Microsoft version of PPPoe.