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 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!
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.
The NTL sales rep eagerly rang back last night, still as clueless as before, but this time he offered me free installation if I signed up there and then so I went ahead and booked it up for 14 August. From what I could gather all the engineer will do is install a cable modem socket, give me a list of companies from whom I can obtain a modem, then disappear out of the door. If I want him to bring a modem with him and setup my PC for me (Windoze PCs only) then there is a £50 installation charge. I chose the D.I.Y route.
I rent my CM from NTL, a decision made because I knew that new models were being deployed in some places and I wanted a free upgrade. I got a new one! The engineers were very helpful, put the cable end where I wanted it, made me up an extra long cable for inside, and dropped off the CM. I did the rest. It isn't worth £50!
Thanks for all your help and advice Laurie,
My pleasure. I wish I had more time to help more. I'm in Ipswich, BTW.
Cheers, Laurie.
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
Thanks for your advice Pete, it is very much appreciated; particularly the tip about leaving the modem switched off for a couple of hours if I ever have to swap NICs.
Fingers crossed for the big day.
Ian.
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Ian Douglas -
Laurie Brown -
Pete Turner