I have been using bellsouth adsl for almost 2 1/2 years now with linux. when i got it, i heard the standard "We only support windows 95,98,NT" so I put an extra nic in my win98 machine, ordered the service, got an alcatel speed touch home external modem, had the tech hook it up to the win98 box, he read the mac address off the nic, called the bellsouth.net isp tech, gave him the mac address, he put the mac in their dhcp server and that was it. as soon as the tech left, i pulled the nic out of the win98 box, put it in a box running suse 6.1 and was immediately connected. installed a second nic, setup a firewall, etc, and have been chugging along ever since. they dont do mac address authentication anymore, but rather force the pppoe connection on you, which is fine for surfing, etc, but sucks if you want to run a server from your house. the simplest way to go though is to just get one of the linksys dsl/cable routers. they do pppoe,port forwarding, ip masquerading, packet filtering, logging, etc and you can even spoof the mac address on one, plus they are small and you dont have to have an extra pc sitting around just do some packet filtering. i have nothing to say but good things about the techincal part of bellsouth adsl - it has been fast (160K/sec downloads are norm) , consistent, reliable (less than 2 days downtime in 2 1/2 years), easy to configure, works with anything, etc. as for the billing part - well that took about 10 months get get straightened out - calling bellsouth each month and bitching and moaning. oh, bell tries to get you with a usb modem nowadays - stay away from that or the internal pci modem. get the external alcatel speed touch home modem. you can tell the bellsouth.net rep you order the service from you have a laptop with windows 95 that has no usb ports and their only option is to ship you the external modem (but it will cost you $150, where the usb one is free) or you can just try to get on off of ebay. On Sat, 20 Oct 2001 jfweber@eternal.net wrote:
**** imagine; all of everything that is or was, can be reduced to an equation less than one inch long ! ***
Okay , getting completely and thoroughly discusted w/ verio , we have gone so far as to contact bellSouth .. who , of course , tell us, they "do not support linux" and wont even send us the modem unless we have windows something on the box.. <heavy sigh> I still have a windows partition I can fudge a bit for purposes of this experiment <g> tho husband is seriously worried that w/o support we wont be able to use it .. I can't imagine why, if anyone did support an OS I was currently using , I'd have to see what was further out on the bleeding edge<g>
Anyway, any users of Bell South in particular , or DSL generally care to share ? headaches , heartbreaks , willingness to suggest answers to tech support type questions .. ??? Especially if you might be willing to take this off list for private discussions, and electronic handholding and "there , there , type soothing noises for Gil ( that's the spouse <g>)
TIA y'all Blonde
-- j
afterthought : DOS tip #17: add DEVICE=FNGRCROS.SYS to CONFIG.SYS.
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Chad Whitten Network/Systems Administrator neXband Communications chadwick@nexband.com