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.
Is there anyone with an NTL cable-connected wireless router?
If I buy a wireless router independently, is it easy to connect it to the cable modem in place of the current XP machine? Any recommendations on a suitable wireless device? Can I persuade the cable modem to accept the router's MAC address? Will the router, which presumably expects an ADSL input, be readily configurable to the cable modem's ethernet connection?
And what are the chances of me managing this operation by telephone from a hundred miles away?
Very many thanks to Paul for his comments and links too:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/robin.d.h.walker/cmtips/register.html http://www.chetnet.co.uk/articles/index.php?page=index_v2&id=60&c=14 Regards, Paul.
I have been browsing around them and related links. There are good "manual registration" instructions there, but these are four years old and I think I will still have the MAC address problem. Many assume the cable modem is handing out 192.168.x.y addresses, but the working machine had an address 81.106.210.x/24.
I did connect our BSD machine to it though a switch, configured it to an adjacent address and was then upset to find it couldn't ping the XP machine. Or the "defalt gateway". I now realise that the XP machine probably had a default firewall, bother it! And the router was probably not accepting the BSD machine's MAC address. Bother it!
Concerning Ted's contract reservations, isn't this sort of thing standard practice? The last time I read the small print on an airline ticket (flights can be very boring) I got the impression that they were under no obligation to fly me anywhere anytime. And NTL are welcome to inspect my BSD boxen as much as they like, they need both a wheel and a root password to get in.