I live in Moscow, Russia, and recently I've switched to a different Internet provider. The new one is called Corbina (home.corbina.ru - Russian language, sorry). To connect from a Windows machine one uses the following procedure:
a) provider gives you an Ethernet cable in your flat. You set up a connection using DHCP with no specific settings and get on the provider's internal LAN (with addresses 10.*). At this stage you can use internal LAN resources (mostly users' FTP servers, some game servers, etc) for free at 100Mbit speed.
b) to connect to the Internet you have to set up a PPTP connection to the provider's gateway using the LAN connection established on the previous step. The details are shown at http://help.corbina.ru/nominee/help/install_set/vpn/vpn_xp.html, they are in Russian, but screenshots are pretty simple and, in fact, there are only three details that should be noted: a) the PPTP connection is made with a host vpn.corbina.net, b) provider assigns a "real" dynamic IP address at this step, c) the encryption is disabled. This PPTP connection gives you the access to the Internet with the bandwidth you paid for.
In my mind, everything you need is: go to: network, interfaces, pptp over ethernet. After klicking this the beloved entries are coming up! Username,Password,a.s.o. If this it working, than you can go ahead with further configs.
Well, I'm from the States, and I can't read Russian, but I think what everyone who's responded so far is missing is that our friend in Russia there has to make a PPTP (not the same as PPOE / PPOA!!!) connection to a VPN server to get out on the internet. The link he posted to the Corbina site has screenshots that look very familiar to me.. it's the VPN configuration dialogs in XP. Unfortunately, I do not believe that the Astaro supports such a configuration. You may need to use some other product (though I can't think of a commercial product that can use PPTP to get an external IP address that I've ever seen)... you may end up having to "roll your own". There is one way that you could use the Astaro... switch it into bridging mode. While your client (XP, I presume) would still need to make it's PPTP connection, the Astaro of course can't "see" inside of the PPTP packet stream to protect you from the internet, but it can protect you from others snooping around in your complex. There's not a real good answer to this problem--maybe ask the provider if they have another solution (PPOE would work fine, as previously noted me and others here).
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