I've been happily using an Alcatel Speedtouch USB modem connected to an ASUS WL-HDD running OpenWRT RC4 as my 'ADSL router'. This has worked great. I can't remember whether there were official packages for the speedtouch in RC4, but somehow I got them and had it working (I think I had to trawl the forums a bit). Anyway, RC6 has some nice QoS stuff in it, so I thought I'd upgrade. However, it doesn't look like anyone has redone the speedtouch package for RC6. I ended up backing up my RC4 install , installing RC6 and then manually copying some of the old files from RC4 in order to get it to work.
One nice thing is that when you do an 'upgrade' by reflashing, all your nvram settings stay. I did a 'micro' install this time
RC6 ipkg packages to install:
kmod-usb-core
kmod-usb-ohci
ppp
libgcc
libpthread
Files you need from RC4
/sbin/ifup.speedtouch
/etc/init.d/S30speedtouch
/lib/modules/2.4.30/n_hdlc.o
/lib/modules/2.4.30/ppp_synctty.o
/usr/lib/speedtouch/firmware/mgmt.o.gz
/usr/sbin/pppoa3
/usr/sbin/modem_run
I had to edit /etc/init.d/S05nvram and added this to the end:
nvram set wan_ifname=ppp0
Also take a good look at the /etc/init.d/S35firewall script. It initially opened up access pretty wide by virtue of the ppp0 interface not being recognised as the outward facing interface.
I think thats pretty much it. If you're troubleshooting, the S30speedtouch does the modem_run bit that loads the firmware from the mgmt.o.gz file into the Speedtouch. The actual ppp link is brought up via the S40network script. The speedtouch is the wan interface effectively. That hack to the wan_ifname nvram setting is because it tends to get overridden by the S05nvram script during the boot. So the S40network script ends up doing a "ifup wan" and then that will call /sbin/ifup.speedtouch (because wan_proto=speedtouch) which kicks off pppd with the args required to bring up the pppoatm link (this is for PPP over ATM style ADSL).
