RE: Cable Modem Questions

["Steve Poling" <sdpoling@xxxxxxxx>]

>Are you generally satisfied with the cable internet?

yes. its nice to have "instant-on" access to the net. and the high bandwidth
makes streaming audio almost skip-free.

downloads are a dissappointment only because expectations were so high. if you
have gnapster or knapster, you'll find you can stream audio through your box and
have 5 downloads going in parallel and each download proceeds at about the same
rate as if you'd only done one. there's some kind of d/l rate limiting going on.


>What kinds of things did you have to do to tweak your
>linux box to work with AT&T's equipment and service?

my desktop Linux box did not need any tweaking except to change the gateway it
uses to the IP of my router (the IP of the connection to my private home
network.)


>Why did you decide to use a gateway/router -- are you
>just cheap and curious like me, or did you have other
>reasons?  =)

i had many reasons:

1. i could, i had the hardware and the software and the will.

2. because a cable modem is always attached, i didn't want an unsecured machine
attached to it. using the gateway/router meant securing a minimalist machine.

3. the ATT cable guy wanted nothing to do with my home network, and I didn't
want him mucking about with it. as it was, when he set me up, he goofed with the
parameters on my machine, he changed the name of the machine temporarily holding
the cable modem's NIC from USGrant to some combination of letters and numbers
that only @Home could find significant. (that obscure name is now the hostname
of my router.)

4. i set up a router/gateway to share my telephone modem with all the machines
on my home network. there was no way I was going to give up my machine so my
daughter could hit barbie.com and my son could play idiot games on garfield.com.
so when i upgraded to the cable modem, i wanted to maintain/improve the same
level of service to my kids.

>I look forward to hearing more about your experience!

i hope you found this useful.

smiles and cheers,

steve