the point being, I know for sure in most of these devices, billion, telewell and lot of cases zyxel you can disable the nat and the firewall. all of them have some sort of functions built in, but keep them off and dedicate the box to just PPPoE and connection.
again, you gotta get one of them devices and see what you can turn off and can you do a PPPoE setup in one of these lines without NAT.
and no, modem/router does not have to support nat, again routing and NAT is not the same thing.
not so long ago when the IP addresses weren't so scarce, we used to setup networks without NAT altogether!
and I have to comment on the standardization... you have gone backwards with your setup. making a brand choice on a desktop is the least significant part.
just as well as making a brand choice on the switches is the second. I do prefer HP over cisco in network and over fujitsu or ibm in the servers. I can still work with all of them and know their weaknesses.
and given the choice, I would remove all our cisco routers for something better.
in standardization the software is more important than the equipment. and that's why your slackware idea seems ok with me. not the hardware but getting the actual processing nailed down right and copying that. that's the bomb.
usage policies and security rules are the most important things though.
getting that to the head of your client and making it an agreement is the next step.
everything else falls into place after that.
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!download
KiXnet