Flutterby™! : Cable frustration 2000-12-20 19:49:01+00

Cable frustration

2000-12-20 19:49:01+00 by Dan Lyke 9 comments

Frustration: Cable guy showed up early, said "Yeah, you can use DHCP, but it's much better to just use static IPs", life is groovy, birds are chirping, then he finds that he's missing the tool to do the cable connection on the pole top. So here I sit with the little RCA box on top of my monitor blinking forlornly... And I'd tell y'all the IP but then every script kiddy in the known universe would be ping-bombing my poor little Winders box (not like that's not gonna happen anyway...).

Well, if you have a spare old PC lying around, visit *my* website: http://www.dubbele.com

Oooohhh. Cool. I had actually been something similar to that for a while on my home network with the Ricochet, but this time around we ended up with a dedicated IP masquerader box lying around work that I've appropriatedd and plugged in in the hopes that my 'net connection will be up soon (no lineman yesterday.... grumble grumble). After that I'm really concerned about my own stupidity, but since the box this is on is plugged straight in, unfiltered, to a completely kick-ass net connection and it's been running (fingers crossed) for over a year I think I can kinda keep my nose out of trouble security-wise. That, by the way, is not meant as a challenge, I know of at least one potential hole that I haven't plugged 'cause I want to be nice to my users.

:-) I have The Great American Firewall Script for evaluation if you'd like to look at it...

After spending many nights trying to get Linux to work exactly the way I wanted as a firewall for my DSL connection, I broke down and bought one of these: http://www.linksys.com/products/product.asp?prid=20&grid=5 Of course my DSL like is on DHCP and BellSouth cycles the IP address a couple times a day. The Linksys handles it in spades. It also does port-forwarding and IPsec pass-thru. Hard to beat for $150. It also uses alot less power than a full PC...

I've got an equivalent UMAX box, once the bastards finally give me a connection. I should've known it was all going to hell when he said "go to work or something, by the time you get back..." Well, I spent 45 minutes on hold today, only to be stepped through some superfluous systems check by someone who was clearly reading off a checklist, and then told "Well, we'll get the local office to call you in 4 to 6 hours." Sigh. And I took the Windows box in to work 'cause I figured he was telling the truth...

When BellSouth came to hook up my ADSL I had the requested Win98 box setup with the case off. It was a fresh install of SE2. The tech took one look at it and the rest of the room (the PC in question is my low-end Compaq P120) and said 'Ahh... You're going to run Windows Internet Connection Sharing... In that case...' I cut him off there and said that as soon as he walks out the door I'll be fdisk'ing the drive and installing Linux. He grinned even bigger. Fortunately he was actually a Bluestar contractor. At that time BellSouth hadn't figured out how to install their own ADSL lines. Since, I've had the forsight never to call tech support - except for the one time I needed to change the MAC address associated with my account. I waited until 2am on a Sunday night and called. The conversation when like this (I was actually setting up my Linksys): ME: "Hello, I need to change the MAC address associated with my account..." BS: "Oh. Did you buy a new network card?" ME: "Ummmm.... Yeah, that's the ticket!" BS: "OK. Read off the MAC address" ME: "00-20-78-C6-23-E9" BS: "OK. It's change in the system. It takes affect immediately" ME: I reset the Linksys, wait about five seconds and open my browser - up comes my home page: "Great, it's working! Thanks!" BS: "OK, Goodbye." I was surprised that he didn't question the fact that I was able to tell him it was working in less than 10 seconds. After all, I get a DHCP IP address and even the fastest Windows machine takes a good 30 seconds to reboot - much less start IE. And at that point BellSouth only sanctioned Windows 98 for use with their ADSL. Personally, I hate dealing with the cable company and the phone company. Heck, I used to get quite frustrated when I would call Chattanooga OnLine! and get a new tech support person. I believe Dan even got his account cut off once by an overzealous accounting clerk (gee, this guy, Dan Lyke, has never paid a dime for his account - that one definitely needs to be shutoff...) "

's happened at least once, new accounting person decided the files needed purging... In fact it's on our "to do" list here at Coyote Grits to start paying for the Flutterby machine, 'cause there's lots of reasons to expand the jobs that server's doing beyond just hosting Flutterby and a few hobby projects...

This is one reason I prefer DSL to Cable. At least down here, at least on the service we're paying $50 a month for, GTE nee Verizon doesn't give a *shit* what we're doing with it.

Our DSL experience has sucked big time. We lose the link several times a day, friends who use PacBell's outbound servers routinely have 12+ hour delays, that's bad enough that we use my colo'd box for our outbound mail relay. And Eric's dealing with DSL too. I think the issue is that at some point companies cross a critical mass and cease caring about customer service. The people I've talked to at cable tech support have been friendly enough, it seems like they're stuck in processes that don't allow for support that goes beyond the "is it turned on" level. So the nice lady I talked to this afternoon just reverted my account to "uninstalled" and scheduled me a new installation.