On Sun, 25 Sep 2005, Christopher Dawkins wrote:
From: (Ted Harding) Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk
A friend of mine, whose phone is already on an NTL line, has just had a cable modem installed by NTL for broadband via an NTL cable. The leaves them with the NTL CD awaiting insertion into their computer to initiate the setup and establish the broadband connection. So far so good.
Amazing coincidence. I am facing the problem that my daughter has just moved in with four others to student lodgings in a house with a freshly installed NTL cable modem, which is working well to the single XP machine that has been plugged into it and configured by NTL's CD.
I spent a frustrating afternoon trying to connect other machines, including my daughter's FreeBSD box, to it. Having now googled, I am sure I failed because the modem is tied to the MAC address of the first machine to connect.
It would presumably be in theory possible to set up ICS on the single working machine for the others to use - better from my POV to set up NAT on the FreeBSD box for the same purpose, with a wireless card to share the connection - but the physical constraints (lodgers not allowed to drill holes and my daughter's room being one floor above the hallway where the connection is) mean the only viable solution will be to upgrade the cable modem to a wireless router.
But NTL's website doesn't mention wireless routers.
If you get something like the Netgear WGT624, you can make it spoof it's MAC address. Connect Netgear to cable modem, then PC's to the 4 internal ports, and via it's web interface you can make it spoof it's MAC address. I set up something similar for my Uncle (who's on Blueyonder), with the non wireless version of that router.
HTH