Time to de-lurk now there is something I know about to reply to :)
* Laurie Brown (laurie@brownowl.com) wrote:
Ian Douglas wrote:
I currently have a spare hard disk with windoze already installed on it which I can temporarily put in the firewall PC for the registration process.
That'll work... It will make things simpler.
I had NTL cable modem for about a year before I moved to an area without it. The modem was never subjected to being connected to a Windoze machine. I used a 486 DX4 100 as a firewall running ipcop. The cable modem was connected directly to this out of the box and I did all of the registration through this without ever installing any NTL software. The online registration was painless and didn't take too long.
The only problem that I ever had was when a nic died and I had to leave the cable modem switched off for a couple of hours because it wouldn't accept the MAC address of the new card. Worked fine after being switched off for a couple of hours.
I think the sales rep said they currently recommend "Terayon TeraJet 210" cable modems.
I know nothing about those. You'd better be sure they do RJ45!
This was the modem that I had. Never used the USB, only ever the ethernet port. Worked fine for me.
Found the DHCP Mini-HowTo. Will print it out and start reading it later today.
DHCP is easy, frankly. The firewall needs to run dhcpcd (the client) to talk to NTL. My IP address has only changed once in more than a year. One of the good things about dhcpcd is it polls NTL every 3 hours and renews the lease so it never expires.
Never messed about with this cause ipcop did it all for me :)
NTL do have a small section on thier website about using Linux, but it isn't really that helpfull. There was a web site I found at the time about using Linux with NTL cable, if I can find the url I'll let you have it.
Pete