Setting up an ONT on Orange FTTH in Poland

I finally got around to having fiber installed in my apartment about a week ago!

There’s just one slight problem, the Funbox 7 (from here on now referred to as the Shitbox 7). I’m a bit of a weirdo, and I like to set my networks up in specific ways, so a device that does not have a bridge mode (except if you’re a business customer sigh) and has completely useless firewall settings, is certainly not ideal.

But wait, we have networking freedom, don’t we? Well, some Polish ISPs have unilaterally decided to exempt themselves from EU law that their western counterparts appear to follow, and don’t give out ONTs to residential customers, how incredibly convenient for them. Maybe one day the government will start doing its job, but until then we are kinda fucked.

Except

There exists a pretty neat company called LeoLabs that makes configurable ONTs. Usually they are used by some other (more sane) ISPs, but you can also just buy them, and they are wide open for modification, you just connect over telnet to 192.168.100.1, put in the username nad password (leox, leolabs_7), and now you can set stuff like the GPON serial number or vendor id.

I ended up buying an LXT-010H-D, it’s pretty damn cheap for what it is, and after putting in the GPON_SN and PON_VENDOR_ID from the Shitbox 7 (it’s printed on the sticker)

# Remember to back up your settings, you can use `flash all` to get all of them!
flash set GPON_SN <sn goes here>
flash set PON_VENDOR_ID <first 4 letters of the sn, in my case ARLT>

At this point I need to say this is likely against ToS and there is always a chance of disrupting other customers, but at the same time Orange is making a bitch out of EU law here to not give ONTs to customers, so maybe if they don’t want unauthorized equipment on their optical networks they should just follow the law themselves. Anyway, from reading online it seems like Orange is fairly lenient on this and people have been running this ONT model for years at a time without issues.

Now the only thing left is setting up the VLAN (35 in this case) and PPPoE (ew!), which means I have to get the credentials from somewhere. The username part is visible in both the Shitbox web panel, as well as the customer panel on the website (it’s a relict from the days of DSL really). But where do you get the password? You could go through support, you might get it out of them, or have it changed, but there’s an even easier way!

The Shitbox 7 allows you to enter said password, and it gives a neat html form for it with a password type field. So what happens if you were to hypothetically right-click on that, inspect element, and change it to text? Yup, you get the password!

After all this, what can be done with such a setup?

Dualstack!

Normally if you enable IPv6 on the Shitbox, all your v4 traffic gets routed via NAT64, which is then behind CGNAT. With a real router however, it’s possible to just open two PPPoE sessions, one for v4 and one for v6!

Proper firewall

Having the ability to properly manage your network? That’s crazy, can’t believe it!

IPv6 prefix delegation

The Shitbox always gets a /56, but no matter what I tried, I could not get it to delegate a prefix over DHCPv6 to my own router. But now there is no Shitbox, I can use my /56 as dog intended!

Setting the MTU on PPPoE to 1500

This trick courtesy of bredo! It’s possible to set the MTU of the ethernet interface to 1508, which then allows you to use 1500 for PPPoE, that’s neat!

Playing doom?

The ONT runs Linux on some MIPS processor, you get root when you log in, and it theoretically has enough RAM to do it, hmmm… This possibility needs to be investigated.

What’s next?

I probably need to upgrade my router, this RB750Gr2 can almost handle a full gigabit on PPPoE (though with quite some CPU load), but something it definitely cannot handle well is a wireguard VPN, which I want to use to add static route between my home and my family’s home. That way the IPv6 traffic to my server will bypass HE, since the other end sadly does not have native v6 and it uses tunnelbroker.

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