The problem as you mention it is something that I have seen as well. For all I have been able to find, it has to do with the load on the ethernet port and very likely, with the occurance of collisions on the ethernet segment it is connected to. Currently, my modem is connected to a dedicated router with a crosslink, and I have no problem whatsoever. However, as soon as I use a hub to connect multiple machines to it, and create substantial load on the segment so that collisions start occurign regularely, the behavior as you describe occurs. This is regardless of if the modem has to 'route' the traffic or not, local traffic will do the trick as well, as long as the modem gets to see it on its ethernet port. I have 2 such modems, and tried with 2 borrowed ones, and in all cases the behavior is identical. I have not been able to recreate this behavior with an outside attack. On another note, it seems to be able to overflow the NAT table of the modem by bombarding it with incomming connections for a port for which an inbound mapping has been made (no surprise that it is possible, but the ease with which it is possible is amazing), which will affect every other inbound nat definition, and will make the browser based user interface fail. Id you have to use this modem anyway, use it with a dedicated link to a machine that is gonna do ppoe and all the nat stuff.. regards, Bart.
