The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Tuesday, May 11, 2004

Cable no more

Due to stellar performance of the cable modem, Spring decided to order DSL from DSLI (the provider Mark uses, and if he's happy with them then they have to be good). That was a few weeks ago, and yesturday the unit arrived. I didn't get a chance to install the unit until today.

Inside of ten minutes, I had the unit unpacked, plugged and powered, the IP address (static! No extra charge!) programmed into the firewall/NAT system (an old 486 running Linux with three NICs, one for the LAN, one for the WAP, and one for the Internet) and ready to go—

Nothing.

The DSL modem powered up with green lights and everything. But couldn't get out on the Internet. Double checked the IP address and yes, everything is correct.

I then call DSLI tech support. Poor guy on the other end never heard of Linux. And then when he asked, “Can you run Outlook or Outlook Express on that?” I told him, rather harshly I'm afraid, “If you are asking if I can check email, yes, I have an email client on the machine.” Subject dropped.

I then noticed that the ethernet light on the firewall wasn't on. I replaced the network cable I got from DSLI with the network cable I used on the cable modem, and after a few minutes, I was on the Internet. I thanked tech support (even though he never heard of Linux, nor really understood what it was, he was still nice, and I was even able to put him on hold) and went about enjoying my new Internet connection.

Oh, I also packaged up the cable modem (putting the bad network cable in the box) for later shipping back to whence it came.

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