A few years ago, I became fed up with my ISP-provided modem-router combo due to lagginess, sluggish DNS, and overall untrustworthiness. I ended up purchasing a Linksys WRT1900 and flashing it with dd-wrt, which chugged along happily for a couple years. However, later in its life, the router would sometimes stop responding, and lazily I would simply reboot it. Slowly, this pattern started occurring more and more frequently, up until the end of its life.
I decided to make a change. I had been using OpenBSD and Freebsd on and off for a better part of ten years, and I figured it was about time to move to a router that I could trust.
The project to develop my own OpenBSD router ended up being so enjoyable, that I am still working on the project today. Slowly fine-tuning and developing various features for myself, and the small handful of people for whom I am running routers for. One big hurdle when I first started this router project, was getting OpenBSD to connect over my ISP’s pppoe connection.
I spent a good couple of days researching how to configure a pppoe connection on OpenBSD, and in the end, my config ended up looking like what is shown below. My router has been happily chugging along now for over a year, and through various revisions and reinstalls, has continued to provide a rock-solid internet connection to me and my house.
/etc/hostname.pppoe0
inet 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.255 NONE \
pppoedev em0 authproto pap \
authname 'myaccount@isp.net' authkey 'mypassword' up
dest 0.0.0.1
!/sbin/route add default -ifp pppoe0 0.0.0.1
Has been tested on OpenBSD 6.4