Hi folks, first post here so please bear with me.

I have just got hooked up to UFB with Telecom and am pleased with the overall package and results.  The connection process was quick and connection is stable so far.  I had a decent ADSL setup before and have a variety of home equipment on my network.  I have noticed a few things not working as they used to and need some help understanding what has changed.

I have done as much reading as I can here and in other places but there are still some gaps in my knowledge and comprehension of how all the pieces fit here.

First off, I am not keen on the Technicolor TG587N and I gather I am not alone.  It broke my Apple network devices in terms of AFP file sharing, iTunes and Time Machine backups.  No updates available so I chucked in a TP-Link Gigabit switch attached to the gig port on the TG587N and that took care of it.  I find the wireless pretty poor as well and would like to get back to using my TP-Link TL-WR2543ND which I have found to be a very capable device.  I stuck it in behind the Technicolor and that worked OK but I don't really want to stay with a double NAT setup.

Question 1:  I gather that the TG587N can be put in bridge mode but I cannot for the life of me find out exactly how!  I don't think it can be done from the standard web interface - can someone please tell me in detail how to do this?

I thought I would also try a more technical approach to see what I could learn.  Using a different router apparently requires setting up PPOE on the WAN interface as well as something called VLAN tagging using a VLAN value of 10.  I thought I understood what VLANs are (used for logical network groupings?) but I don't quite see how that fits in here.

Anyway I could not work out how to do any of this stuff using the standard firmware on the TP-Link router so I decided to change it to using OpenWRT and got 12.09 running OK on the box.  I have trolled through the new web interface and tried a few experiments with PPOE (user@xtrabb.co.nz/password) and setting a VLAN 10 assigned to the WAN interface but have not succeeded in getting an Internet connection yet, so:

Question 2: can some please explain how to set up OpenWRT (command line is fine) to get the PPOE connection working between the TL-WR2543ND and the ONT?

Thanks in advance for any help and enlightenment!