[Ubermik]

Firstly I dont quite get the relevance of what layer DHCP might be, its a one time deal which would have been completed before a packet is even attempted to be sent to the internet

That aside the router will wrap or try to wrap wan aimed packets with the gateway address and will then not send it because it fails the validity check or having established the gateway was flawed at setup will just not be routing at all

The modem on the other hand IS just that, it doesnt attempt to route or wrap the packets and does just act as a bridge leaving the routing to the router as far as I'm aware

As for what happens when I "do it", thats already outlined in the original post

With the bogus gateway supplied by telewest I get absolutely no traffic to the modem from the router at all (I have a netgear router which shows packets to and from the modem on a statistics page), so theres no net access at all

When I connect one of the PC's directly to the modem it picks up exactly the same IP information but works flawlessly and I have full internet access

If I manually enter the IP information with the correct gateway into either the PC or the router both still work perfectly



When you say a "wrong" gateway in your experiment what does that mean?

Some random but wrong one or an actual wrong one supplied by telewest but still part of their IP address pool? Because the first one I wouldnt expect to work with either the PC or the router connected to the modem, the second wont work with the router but will with the PC


I have the SB3100 modem, so its only an ethernet connection with no USB facility BTW