I don't really understand what you mean by 'Don't really like/would prefer to have my own firewall rather than rely on the router which TM Provides.' 

Using the DIR-615 as a VLAN switch allows home users who are experiencing issues with their DIR-615 (weak wireless/connections drops/router crashes) to use their own hardware to manage the PPPoE connection, NAT and router security. It's the easiest solution I can think of. Of course, in your case you're using a Linux box and thanks to the 8021q kernel module you're pretty much good to go. Why would you mention power consumption anyway? A dedicated PC as a router (unless its a laptop or Atom chipset) would pretty much run at about 200watts on average (?) compared to using an additional embedded system (DIR-615) which peaks at 12.5watts. Since its running on Linux, you can also easily setup IPTV support provided you have the needed amount of NICs.

I could ask everyone to purchase a Mikrotik RB750G/450 to handle the VLAN tagging, IPTV and PPPoE link but many people would not be able to setup an IP router to do this using the command line interface alone. They would also still need to purchase an additional AP/router for WIFI access. I understand your concerns about power consumption and I did take this into account but I figure the DIR-615 doesn't even use as much power as a light bulb :/ Anyway, you can blame TM for not giving you a BTU which can perform VLAN tagging/untagging as needed

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I tried my best to look for a solution that would suit everybody's needs and the DIR-615 as a VLAN bridge was the best that I could think of. I can't recommend dd-wrt because there's a unique configuration for each router. -pWs- for example has his dd-wrt router replace the WAN interface with the default one every time he reboots the system.. so in his case he needs a startup script to reset this glitch. 76radius had his dd-wrt router screw up the iptables rules everytime it rebooted.. he also needed a startup script to fix this problem.

There's no way you can have stability without sacrificing low power consumption and vice-versa. I myself use pfSense because I need rock solid stability but I've also used the DIR-615 in bridge mode for 1 week+ without having it crash on me even once.

You need to setup VLAN 500 on your physical WAN port then set your WAN interface assignment to <WANinterfacename>.500 . All of this is done in the Networking page, no need to touch the VLAN/port based VLAN page. Though I have to tell you, I had a lot of problems getting it to dial initially (even though all the settings were correct) and had to use Wireshark + an old 10mbps hub to sniff the PPPoE auth traffic and see what was going on.

yup did that, but i cant seem to get it to dial thru. when you did the wireshark, what did you discover and what was the fix for the issue?

Full dd-wrt flashing + configuration guide for the TM DIR-615 G1 and Unifi is up -- http://unifi.athena.my/index.php?option=co...id=53&Itemid=65

Hey babybee, I can't be 100% certain what's going on with your unit unless I take a packet capture of the traffic between the BTU <---> Linksys. However, based on what you're telling me it seems the case is either :

1. Your Linksys is sending out untagged traffic on vlan1 despite you setting the WAN port assignment (hence no response)
2. You've selected the wrong port, vlan1 is not your WAN port and tagged traffic is being sent out on something which is not connected to the BTU

Perhaps you can try creating a bridge (br0) and adding all three vlans in (vlan0,vlan1,vlan2).. then set VLAN tag 500 on br0. After that, use br0.500 as your WAN port assignment and see if it can dial in? I would also try to eliminate the possible problems here so its best that while you're attempting to get PPPoE running.. don't set any port based vlans.

Did anyone have a list of modem that had been verify that it is working for Unifi?

Another LYNer here who uses dd-wrt with Unifi (rogue I think) set his WAN port to a bridge interface to get it to work so I'm guessing it can connect through that (as long as all your interfaces are in the same bridge). A while ago when I was writing my Unifi VLAN forwarder, I basically had to analyze PPPoE auth packet captures for 4 hours straight because my application had to rewrite source/dest MAC addresses as well as add a 4 byte VLAN tag after those MACs.. I pretty much know how the BTU will respond to spoofed PPPoE packets so based on that knowledge I'm making those two guesses above.

But yeah, I can't be sure of anything until I see an actual packet capture. Hacked hardware like dd-wrt does not always function the way we assume it does :/

W'okay but its easier to use an old hub (which mirrors traffic to each port) or a managed switch with port mirroring If you're using *pcap based software like Wireshark, you must also perform the capture in Linux because Windows NIC drivers which don't support VLAN tags (nearly all realtek cards) will automatically strip off VLAN tags from your capture so you won't know what's really going on.

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Added on August 9, 2010, 11:18 am
This is an ADSL2 modem+router combination right? I'm just guessing because it has ATM VC based PVIDs

Edit : doh, just saw the ADSL thing up there haha

This can only be used with DSL providers which send certain services over VLANs.. can't be used with Unifi.

Its only for ADSL based services AFAIK. Like a service provider will be able to do what Unifi does (separate VOIP/Internet/Video) but within an ATM link instead. A VLAN tag is just a 4 byte array of data anyway.. although to you guys it's probably the most annoying 4 byte string since it prevents you from using your own hardware with Unifi
Backtrack will be fine

i got my UniFi this morning. Speed test result.