** Dave Briggs briggs.dave@gmail.com [2006-11-20 10:07]:

Hi chaps

Finally got round to installing the latest Ubuntu on my desktop machine. It's dual booting with Windows at the moment, but once I'm sure everything is working I'll be removing the Windows partition.

All I have to connect with the internet at the moment is the cruddy Sagem modem I got with my Tiscali broadband, so I'm looking for an ethernet one to use instead. I spotted this one [ http://tinyurl.com/yyyb7j ] on ebay (I have some money on paypal to spend...) - is it a good choice? I'm not fussed about wireless at this stage, so this looks a good solution.

Any views would be gladly received!

** end quote [Dave Briggs]

I actually have one of these as a backup. First thing to say is that if you're not stuck on using PayPal you can get it cheaper at Novatech:

http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?LIN-ADSL2M

As for the unit itself, apart from offering the ethernet connection it is very much just a modem. It seems to work OK, but don't expect it to do any form of port forwarding or other more advance features.

That said, it does seem to work OK so far, and I have it set up with a Linksys wireless 4 port router thing. In spite of spending a good hour trying to explain what I wanted to do to the tech support people and then getting passed on to the second level they insisted that I would have to purchase a different unit to get port forwarding working (thank goodness for free phone support). They didn't really understand my technical query (port forwarding and bridging etc. seemed beyond their vocabulary), however when I put the phone down and finished off the experimentation I'd been doing for an hour while talking to them (minus interuptions while they got be to do pointless reconfigurations) I did get the router to bridge to the modem and it is now port forwarding, all be it it could do better and I'd like a bit more control over the modem than I now have (no access to the web interface any more) - I still need to experiment a bit though.

Hope that is of help :)