My mate called me, and told me that he'd had a Telstra tech out to test the ADSL line, and apparently the issue was with the modem, not the line.

He's now had 2 alcatel speed touch modems shit themselves. They really must be quality equipment.

He found a Dynalink RTA100+ modem in an ozemail install kit that was never used, and set that up.

It had it's own issues though, it would take ages for the web interface to come up, and the port forwarding didn't seem to work, and NAT was broken, because LimeWire wouldn't connect through it.

I grabbed a spare machine he had hanging around, and put a couple of extra network cards in it, and install IPCop on it.

I reconfigured the crappy RTA100+ in full bridge mode, so that IPCop could deal with the authentication, but I couldn't get that working even for some reason.

First it was the same issue I had when I setup my IPCop box, it detected the LAN cards in the wrong order, so I had the ADSL modem plugged into the blue interface, instead of the RED, once I sorted that, it would almost connect.

There was PPP/LCP stuff going on, but then there was some "denied requesting message" error (or something similar), and it wouldn't connect.

I tried configuring the bridging several times, and gave up at about 3am, and came home.