On October 15, 2003 02:49 am, Len Lawrence wrote: > Well I am about to shoot myself, again! Finally made the decision to > go broadband, having been advised on this list that there would be no > difficulty with a Linux system. Contacted Telewest BlueYonder, and > the technician turned up today, and found he could not install the > modem because there is no Windows machine in the house. He could not > install the hardware and leave it without it being configured and > presumably talking to base. All he would do is load a CD into > Windows, if it were available, and let it run. His supervisor gave > him some story about having to run the Windows setup before the modem > could be used. I am so completely ignorant about networking that I > could not even begin to suggest how we might go about experimenting > with it to try and get the modem recognised and the connection > working. All I could give the poor lad was the MAC address of eth0 > and all he knew was that the connection needed to be configured under > DHCP. > > Can anybody tell me just what information would be required for a > simple standalone setup? And is it true that the cable modem can only > be initialized by proprietary software? > > I have perused various HOWTOs without seeing exactly what kind of > information is needed. IP addresses of course. Presumably I could > badger Telewest to give me those in written form, but what else? The > dialup connection was simple to configure because Demon provided all > the relevant parameters.
Ya know I just sit here and giggle at companies that send out alleged techs to do this sort of work. Part timers given a sticker for their car and a Winblows CD and off they go. Funny thing is that in my experience the CD is just about worthless in that it doesn't work 50% of the time. And even funnier is that they assume that all home users will run winblows. Okay..so all that said...here goes. For DSL or cable you gave the tech all he needs to know in the MAC address. All he should need to do is register that address and you're off. Some cable modems handle this differently in that they have their own MAC address and come preconfigured. For DSL you need the MAC. So the simple thing at your end to to make sure the provider has, in fact, registered your MAC address with your provider against your account. Now comes the really difficult part. (I'm feeling wicked this morning. :-) ) Pull up MCC then go to your internet/network choice and set up eth0 (or eth1 if that's where it is) as DHCP client. Let MCC load whatever packages it needs and let it restart the network. You should now have your IP from your provider. Try to surf. If you can..you're on. If you can't I'll bet dollars to donuts that your provider is having a hissy fit because you're using Linux and haven't properly registered your MAC against your account. Bug the hell out of them. I've been in the telecom business for 30 years and it never ceases to amaze me how totally ignorant the MSCE's who run DSL for telecoms are. The fact that I get calls in the field every day about this tends to prove it. "Support couldn't tell me how to do this but they said you knew!" Somehow this always happens when I'm on top a pole in the pouring rain. Sheesh! Add this to the fact that the IT people are running all the DSL servers on, ta da!!!, Linux or OpenBSD. Particularly after Slammer the quickest way to get fired from our IT department is to deploy a Windows box pointing the the network cloud. The next step is to turn off/decline all firewalling and anti virus at your provider and make darn sure they haven't given you a modem with the "hardware firewall" in place. Those things cause more trouble than they prevent. Note that the provider site firewall/antivirus is a customer option not thier own firewalls. Haywire Mac has the right way to prepare for an oddball way of connecting DSL that's often used in Europe and is used by some companies in North America (can anyone say S-P-R-I-N-T?). After that the above should apply. ttfn John
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