BT IPTV (YouView) on OpenBSD

This is a writeup on using OpenBSD for home networking (routing, firewall) on a BT broadband link with Youview IPTV. It took me some days of tinkering to get this to work.

Hardware

The connection is a standard 80/20 mbit/s VDSL2 link, with a BT OpenReach modem (Huawei Echolife HG612). OpenReach ECI modems also work as well as other standard VDSL2 modems however I've had the best success and most stable connection with the Huawei (and this modem can be unlocked).

The server running OpenBSD is a PCEngines APU2 with three ethernet ports, em0, em1 and em2. I'm using em0 as the WAN interface connected directly to the modem and em1 as the LAN interface, connected to a network switch and the clients.

Setup

Overview

A broadband connection is made using PPPoE on vlan 101. IPTV mutlicast is injected from the cabinet outside of the PPP link and arrives on the bare ethernet.

Broadband data connection (PPPoE)

The standard broadband data connection uses PPPoE, users on non-openreach modems should take care as ALL data from the modem ethernet is tagged on VLAN 101, Openreach modems automatically listen on vlan 101 and detags before it reaches you.

This is where BT does things in a fairly standard way as just a regular PPPoE connection is made, BT also supports RFC 4638, so the PPPoE connection can have an MTU of 1500. I have done it this way to avoid fragmentation issues.

With em0 as the ethernet connection to the modem my /etc/hostname.em0 looks like this

mtu 1508 up

MTU is set to 1508 as this includes the MTU of the PPPoE connection (1500) plus 8 bits encapsulation.

For the PPPoE connection my /etc/hostname.pppoe0 is as follows

inet 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.255 NONE mtu 1500 \
pppoedev em0 authproto chap \
authname bthomehub@btbroadband.com up
dest 0.0.0.1
!/sbin/route add default -ifp pppoe0 0.0.0.1

Change the pppoedev em0 term to pppoedev vlan101 and create the /etc/hostname.vlan101 file if you are handling the vlan detagging yourself.

Once a connection is made pppoe0 will be the default route, you can then build tunnels on top of this if you wish.

Note: I had some issues both the ECI and huawei openreach modems where the lifetime of the PPPoE connection would not be longer than 6 minutes. This was apparently caused by the modems doing an aggressive handshake with the cabinet despite a poor SNR. I solved this by unlocking the huawei modem (there are instructions online for this), telnetting in and issuing a command to renegotiate with higher SNR.

username: admin
password: admin
> sh
> xdslcmd configure --snr 120

You can find more details on this here.

YouView IPTV

This was a little tricky to get working and it took days of playing around, reading online and looking through packets with wireshark.

The crux of the issue is that the IPTV multicast stream required for youview is injected from the cabinet outside of the PPP tunnel. You will require igmpproxy to register the streams and provide correct multicast routing. Enable igmpproxy and multicast routing

In /etc/rc.conf.local

multicast=YES
multicast_router=YES
pkg_scripts=igmpproxy

In /etc/sysctl.conf

net.inet.ip.mforwarding=1

Some of these options might not be needed, I haven't tested removing any yet.

In order to access and route the multicast stream you need to assign an address to the WAN ethernet, update the /etc/hostname.em0 file to reflect this

mtu 1508 up
inet 10.22.22.10 255.255.255.0 10.22.22.255

You can choose any IP address for this, BT doesn't care but it's wise to choose one from the private block that you won't use.

For igmpproxy you'll want to update /etc/igmpproxy.conf to include the interfaces and multicast address blocks

quickleave
phyint em0 upstream # WAN interface
        altnet 224.0.0.0/4 # youviw IPTV address blocks
        altnet 109.159.247.0/24

phyint em1 downstream # LAN interface

The final part of this are the appropriate pf rules