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Some Customers Can Roll Their Own DSL
Allnighterking writes: "SBC has announced self installed DSL for large sections of their coverage area according to this article at CNN.com. More information available here for your area. Seems that they believe the support is available only for win98 at the moment with Linux et al support coming later. However, it's been my experience that with a little bit of networking knowledge and the external modem you can make it work on *nix now. The claim is that you can install in under one hour with 24/7 support available."
you would have fast, courteous installation, too!
I waited months for my dsl to be installed.
When the tech (finally) showed up a couple of days after the initial appointment date, he had me run the wiring from the phone box, as that wasn't part of his job. Ok, no problem.
When it came time to install the dsl modem and software, he said that it only worked with Windows. I wanted to put the modem on a linux box that happened to have two ethernet cards. It took me 10 minutes to convince him that all I needed was the IP, netmask..., etc to get it up and running, and that YES, it WOULD WORK on linux.
He finally showed me his work order, I configured the ethernet interface on the linux box and we were up and running in five minutes.
So, I had to run the wire, and configure the box...good thing that I qualified for "free" installation.
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I'm signing up for telocity DSL today. They do the self install kit. They also give you a static IP, don't care if you register a domain and point it to your DSL (as long as you don't run a biz off of it), and list UNIX under their supported OS's.
Not too shabby...
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-- Segmentaion Fault (core dumped)
For those of you using Bell Atlantic DSL, and having trouble with it, you may want to check out http://www.telocity.com. Having just set up a new phoneline and DSL for my apartment at school, I have become very disturbed at Bell Atlantic's ineptitude. In reviewing DSL service, at first I couldn't see anything good about paying ten dollars more for Atlantic Bell then the fifty dollars a month for Telocity. Looking into the features of each Telocity easily became a better deal, with 3 emails, *nix support, a static ip, 24/7 support, and remote dialup if you are away from home. However the truth of the service became even more clear as I waited for my phoneline to get hooked up. Bell Atlantic, although I do have phoning capability, is still reading a dead line when they test my line from headquarters. Telocity's DSL test, however, confirmed that while my telephone in Bell Atlantic's database was faulty, Telocity's real time testing tools confirmed that my line was both operational and ready for DSL. Basically be very very careful with both phone companies and DSL providers ... had I relied on the phone company to confirm my line was working properly I probably would have had to wait months for DSL and more then likely had to use them. I am very glad I did not get burned.
Code softly but carry a big magnet.
US West has been doing this for at least a year. They ship you a modem and say to call if you have trouble. It's pretty brain dead: Plug yellow wire into NIC. Plug grey wire into phone jack. Plug black wire into wall wart. Any questions? :)
--GnrcMan--
However, I think he already knows your devilish plan
Nothing FreeBSD+NAT can't fix :)
In geek speak that means he's doing exactly what you just said.
1) Plug splitter into wall
:)
2) Plug DSL "modem" into data side of splitter
3) Install NIC (ok, might be hard for some folks)
4) Plug NIC into DSL device
5) Boot Windows
6) Tell Windows to "automatically configure IP information"
7) Reboot Windows
Done.
This is news?
Odds are they're doing it because they are SO backlogged on installs, they can't keep up. Time Warner did the same thing with RoadRunner here in Austin, for the same reasons.
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Here in Austin there's a company advertising their "DSL Cable Modem Technology."
Um...
I guess they figured people had heard of "cable modems" before (they were rolled out before DSL) so they'd give the great unwashed something to latch onto...
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I've had it through my local TPC for a few weeks now. The installer took one look at my setup and let me do most of the installation myself. All he did was put a splitter box outside the house, and swap my single RJ11 for a double one. No PPPoE, no DHCP, just a Fujitsu modem and a piece of paper with IP addresses on it. Couldn't have been better, as far as I'm concerned. Took me a few hours to get the Linux firewall configured, but now it's great.
The uplink trick is fine for most people, but I think a lot of people with somewhat "valuable" data on their home networks (many gigs of MP3's, anyone???) would want some sort of block between them and that dsl box -- hence the router/firewall combo boxen that are popping up EVERYWHERE.
:)
Karnal
You may not be sharing bandwidth at your neighborhood node - but you are sharing it once you hit the ISP, and they do have a care about how much bandwidth you're taking up.
I know I roll my own, but I don't call it DSL...
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heLlo... myy naame issh Linush Thoralvades, and I pronounsch (hic) it, "vodka"!
I have DSL form swbell. I'm mostly satisfied but i couldn't figure out why i wasn't getting an address form dhcp. People in neighboring towns that had dsl just used dhcp and went.
Well sbc now uses PPPoE (ppp over ethernet). I'm using rp-pppoe from Roaring Penguin. This is under Linux.
If you get the DIY Plus special, you get 3 miles of copper wire, a trench digger, and right of way from your place of residence to the CO.
This is my sig.
Yeah. THat's what I said, in less detail.
If they bridge, even with filtering, you still can't block *all* non-local traffic and still have things work. some broadcast traffic must get through. ARP. etc. It's layer 2, after all...
The point of pppoe is to simply use the layer 2 infrastructure you built to tunnel PPP.
Multiple IP addresses are easy to stop with filters.
And PPP servers don't usually log.. radius servers do.
While that is a feature, there are some other nice advantages. If you want to have more then one type of service on a single circuit (say best-effor 100x over subscribed AOL account for one PC, and a mere 4x oversubscribed small-bisness account for another -- or even the same PC depending on what you are using it for) you can do it with PPPOE, while that is hard to impossable with DHCP.
You can do a lot more configuration at a higher level. Tracking an account number is much simpler then tracking a set of MAC addresses (which will change if the consumer gets a new computer, or ethernet card - and may move from point to point on your network anyway!). Tracking an account number tends to be somewhat simpler then tracking a (Router,Card,Curcit-ID) tuple, and it simplifyes moves as well.
It also disrupts a home network far less. You don't have to configure your network aware printer NOT to ask for a DHCP address (which would end up putting it on the global net, and possably using your only address!). If you have multiple computers allready on a network, and you want to put one on the Internet, this won't force you to get another card for it, or to sever it's connection with the existing network. This may be a rare case, but I assure you it was one the authors of the RFC did have in mind. Rember if your ISP does DHCP for you, it is a lot harder for you to also do DHCP for your local network!
If the ISP allready has a RADIUS infrastructure set up for a large dial network, this allows them to reuse it for DSL. This is a fairly big deal because beleve it or not it is a pain integrate yet another database (DHCP's configuration) with allready existing order, payment, accounting, and other random systems at the ISP. A PPPOE baised DSL set up will look a whole lot like the existing dial set up (presumably with a higher monthly fee).
The only problem is that they haven't delivered anything yet, and this is the second time we've ordered DSL at our current address (the first order evaporated, even though they're billing me for it).
Word to the wise: You may want to get the self-install option no matter what. The last PacBell guy to install DSL at our old apartment did the following:
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
Here in Lexington, Kentucky, demand for ADSL has been so great that GTE has started a self-install promotion also. They give you the splitter, the modem, the jack, etc, etc, and you get to do it yourself. Then they only have to come out if it doesn't work. See http://www.gte.com/dsl/sys_reqs_equip.html for their blurb on this.
I for one am glad they weren't doing this back when I got DSL on my line -- my house is about 70 years old and my phone lines were about 50 years old ; they came in and rewired everything from the pole on the street to the wall jack -- for free. Gotta love those early bird install specials...
I'm with you on this. I've got GTE ADSL and the setup was nothing. I don't even think it took 30 minutes. Hell, I spent more time waiting in line at the UPS parcel pickup counter.
FYI for those of you using routers...don't bother. I can get multiple connections running at once by plugging the DSL modem into an uplink port on a little cheapo hub and use straight CAT 5 to hook up the ethernet cards on my machines.
...is that this program is only for a portion of their coverage area. And their DSL coverage area only covers a small fraction of their service area.
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CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
OpenBSD supports PPPoE as of version 2.7.
e &aprop os=0&sektion=0&manpath=OpenBSD+Current&arch=i386&f ormat=html
jon
http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=pppo
-- http://www.cerastes.org
Cable is well and good until either (A) everyone in the neigborhood gets it and nukes the bandwidth or (B) you want to run a web/name/other server and the company forbids it.
"You done taken a wrong turn."
-Bill McKinney, in Deliverance
Eh? I don't think this is why they run PPPoE. It's easy enough to set up DSL so that each user is bridged in and gets a single IP address. However, this approach has some security drawbacks. One is that it's hard to keep people from hooking up more than one computer, and grabbing more than one real IP address (or a whole ton of IP addresses.) It's also pretty hard to track down who did what when without PPPoE. If the evil hax0r kiddie changes his MAC address, steals an IP (instead of going thru the DHCP server), starts his DoS attack, and then puts his MAC back to normal and DHCP's an address, the ISP is going to have a hell of a time figuring out which user that traffic came from. They will have an IP address, but it was never assigned. If they happen to have an arp entry, they may have a MAC address. But, it's a MAC that isn't on the network anywhere. They could keep a log of every change in the bridging tables, but I'm not sure how realistic that is. Even then, and "smart" kiddie will change his MAC address to one used by a legit user, so when the ISP starts looking around they will track the traffic down to the wrong house.
On the other hand, getting an IP address from PPPoE requires you to login. So, any traffic from that address is provably from that user. All neat and tidy. Any reasonable PPP server will easily log each login session. Much easier from an ISP's point of view than dealing with the limitless ways a customer can screw with a plain old DSL line (or a cable modem. Most of the problems I mentioned apply to them both.)
Then they ship me the 'customer self-install kit' a few days before my appointment with the technician, which includes a DSL modem, ethernet card, crossover cable to connect the two, and a bunch of filter boxes that connect to the phones on the line with DSL to strip out the noise. I call up and ask if, since i've received the customer install kit, I can in fact do my own installation. No, I'm told, I'll have to have a technician install it, and there must have been some mistake in shipping me the kit.
The technician shows up this morning, and the only thing he does that I couldn't have done with a page of instructions was to plug a signal meter into the line with DSL on it and declare the quality sufficient. Then all he did was monkey around on my Windows machine installing the PPPoE software, signed on in the 'register new user' account, pulled up the online signup page, and let me type in my preferred username and password.
That signal meter reading apparently costs $99, because that's how much a technician install costs. Self-install is free.
So, my non-technical tip of the day: if you get DSL from Southwestern Bell, and they send you a self-install kit, self-install.
The technical tip for the day: PPPoE works just fine with SBC DSL. If you've got a development kernel, build it with 'packet socket' and 'PPP over ethernet' options enabled, and apply this patch to a recent version of pppd.
My /etc/ppp/options looks like this:
defaultroute /etc/ppp/pppoe.so
plugin
name mylogin
And my /etc/ppp/pap-secrets looks like this:
mylogin * mypass
To bring up the ppp link, i just type pppd eth0.
Let's say that SBC is very successful with their free PC offer. Of course, a few crackers will be receiving these as well. And they will probe them for vulnerabilities and will find them. I don't mean to cast some fear/uncertainty/doubt here. But I wonder if having a large number of computers with identical vulnerabilities constantly connected on a tight range of IP addresses / hostnames will make them very prime targets for attack? ("Attack" means unwitting hosts for software for coordinated denial of service attacks, IRC bots, etc.)
Please help me out here. Am I being silly, or is this a serious concern?
"DSL service is flexible enough to grow with the skills and interests of our users."
I couldn't tell you what this means. Sounds pretty inane to me.
"DSL is as reliable as your phone."
I live in an upstairs flat. That means, one family lives downstairs and I live upstairs. I have Ameritech DSL, they have Media One Cable. I current (for the past 5 months) have had better than 93% uptime. My downstairs neighbor has had just over 61% (61.224%). At least here, DSL has been dramatically more reliable than cable. The only time it's been down is when, amusingly enough, my phone service was down as well, due to a storm.
"DSL speed ... stays consistent, as opposed to the shared systems used by cable companies where speed may decrease as more users sign up."
Again, with the same test-bed as above, my service gives me a constant speed as a rule. I've not yet seen a slowdown. Downstairs, when they first signed up, they never had a speed problem. Now, they get much slower downloads since more people have signed up. Additionally, Friday at 8:00 PM, they might as well be on a modem. The traffic is nearly at a HALT. *shrug* I dunno if it's true in all places, but both here in Detroit and in Upstate NY it happens to be.
"Cable modem services often do not support a wide variety of Internet applications."
I have two takes on this. Both Media One Cable and Road Runner Cable support (i.e. provide support) for a very limited number of programs. Specifically they'll support Internet Explorer (5.0, but not any other version, even upgrades), Windows 95 and Windows 98 (not NT, not 2000, not Linux, NOTHING else). If you're running Netscape, they won't help you. If you're having trouble figuring out how to telnet, you're out of luck. Having trouble with a firewall, you're out of luck.
The other side is, there are applications that they don't support, in that, both Road Runner and Media One will discontinue your account for running a server. When I inquired about running servers with my sales rep., he specified that servers were no problem. When I asked about it while speaking to technical support, they replied as if it were the most unintelligent question in the world when they said "yeah, run all of the servers you want, it's your bandwidth". Review of the terms and conditions also mentions that servers are allowed.
I'm not necessarily defending their marketing crap, I'm just trying to explain.
-Jer
I thought that 'xDSL' was just a generic term encompassing aDSL, sDSL, etc....
The only thing that is a bit different with today's dsl providers (and perhaps cable soon) is their use of PPPOE. (ppp over ethernet). The reason? They bring things out to the home at layer 2 (ethernet), rather than the more traditional layer 3, but want to really give you a layer 3 anyway. In other words, they don't wanna waste address space building infrastructure.
This is actually a good thing.. it's just a bit different.
The main problem I had was that the modem was shipped from the other side of town via 2-day UPS, the day before the install date.
/24 netmask, not a /29! (My DSL is a bridged Ethernet link.)
UPS takes their 2-day shipping very seriously, so of course it arrives 5pm the day after the install. Fortunately, the SBC guy had one old Alcatel 1000 in the truck. I suppose self-install would help with this, because you wouldn't have to waste a day off from work if the modem doesn't show up.
A big problem while wiring things up was that the telco guy forgot to remove the half-ringer (a little gray block hidden under the phone jack thingy in the junction box) and I was getting a shit connection because of it. Another problem was that either the modem or the splitter or both expected the signal on black/yellow. So I just bridged the damn pairs in the dual phone jack I bought for the line.
The final problem was that while SBC was the "dialtone" provider for the DSL, they weren't the ISP. I had jump.net (which I am entirely happy with), and I had a fixed IP block. The telco guy was on a conference call with the ISP and the phone company for half an hour before I realized I had a
And there was a good part... when the telco guy tested my line, he said my maximum download (with the extra cost higher speed option, of course) would be 2.7 or so Mbps download, nearly twice a T1 and about half the maximum.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Rolling my own may save a bit of time, but I'd be willing to wait even a month to get a better service elsewhere. Anyhow, that's my person take on it. Your mileage may vary.
SWB = South Western Bell
SBC = Southwestern Bell Corporation
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
This is the same setup that came with my GTE DSL. They Fedexed me the modem, some line filters, a CAT 5 Cable and a CD. I personally didn't use the CD, but their service is setup to use DHCP. I easily installed my 2 Win98 and 1 Redhat machine (over a cheap 10BaseT 8 port hub). The service didn't complain about me using 3 IP's so I assume you can install multiple machines through GTE with no problems (or maybe my bill will be more than I expected!! :)).
I thought someone said there was going to be free beer!
I noticed the box my Kingston card came in had the "100baseT" box marked, but it was just a plain old 10baseT card. :(
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
SBC is planning to have most of their major metropolitan areas upgraded for total DSL coverage by the end of 2001. I presume this will be done by putting DSLAMs in the sheds. (You know, the sheds with two doors that each have a five-button lock.)
This link has PDF maps of the planned coverage areas.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
My dsl ROUTER doesn't make that noise! Dig? It doesn't even plug into a parallel port, so hell yeah it's external... : )
That's because your ears suck. The whole point of DSL is that the DSL modems use frequencies higher than you can hear. And what's left is supposed to be taken care of by the splitter/filters.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I have the dubious honor of being the first paying customer for Nevada Bell DSL -- now a part of SBC Advanced Internet Services -- in Northern Nevada (the Reno area). My service was installed over a year ago. At the time, I elected to go with "Nevada Bell Internet," a re-brand of PacBell Internet...and an unwanted step-child it was, too.
In the early days, NBI was using bridging mode instead of PPPoE, so it was no problem at all to shift the install from the Windows 98 system I stuck in front of the installer to the Red Hat Linux system that functions as my NAT firewall.
Because of a number of issues documented elsewhere (dslreports.com) I fired NBI and went with another ISP, a then-local company called Pyramid.Net.
One of the reasons I went with Pyramid.Net was the promise from the operator that they would continue to use bridging mode, instead of moving to something like PPPoE. They have kept their promise.
Pyramid.Net is not the only "partner" to SBC to provide briding mode access, which is a true always-on service (as opposed to the necessity of logging in a la PPPoE) with a surprisingly high availability.
Moral of this tale: go with a "partner", not the [A-Za-z]+ Bell Internet company.
The newsgroup comp.dcom.xdsl regularly carries postings from people with horror stories. Note particular those stories told by Bell Atlantic customers...
I had my DSL, complete with outside splitter, running in about a half hour or so, and I'll never go back to dial-up. :)
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I have a friend who recently got DSL through NorthPoint. The USWest guy came out, climbed the pole, came down, scratched his head a few times, then repeated the process a few more times. He seemed really pessimistic about getting an SDSL setup in a fairly old home with elderly telco equipment, but on his second visit, he managed to get everything perfect. Two wires ran from from the pole to his house, and were bolted into a box on the side of his home. He opened the thing up, told him "you didn't see this", then unhooked one wire and connected it to the other bolt! All of a sudden, he had 416kb DSL 17k feet from the CO instead of a 24kbps modem connection...
What do those guys do all day???
I registered my hate for Jon Katz
I have Bell Atlantic (ugh) DSL, and they have these little "Self-install" kits they ship out. Takes w hopping 30 minutes to set up. Am I missing something here?
--
Matt Singerman
Matt Singerman
http://matt.vegan.net/
Yeah... but did you see the strings attached? Not only do you have to lock into a two year contract (with heavy severance penalties), but you have to pay a $200 "shipping and handling charge" . Come on. How stupid do they think their customers are? I hate it when a telco shows their true colors. (Want to bet they won't let me just "pick it up" from them to avoid the shipping fee?)
If you're in my boat, and you get basic DSL from SBC thru your telco, you're goign to be using (as others have mentioned) PPPoE.
If youre using windows to control your router, this is probably an ok situation. however, there appears (at this time, anyway) to be a significant lack of quality PPPoE options for people running linux; people runnign openbsd (at least as of the time that I installed my DSL) are completely screwed.
the solution: the Cayman (www.cayman.com) 3220H. this little box is a very fullfeatured router that operates on its own - no need to have a computer control it, which means that you can reboot your gateway machine without losing your IP. all PPPoE negotiations are done by the router itself.
I have one of these; I don't work for or own any of Cayman, just thought I'd let you people knwo the option is available. usually your telco or sbc or whatever will charge you like another hundred bux or so for this box, but in my opinion, it's well worth it.
(note that you'll have to download the newest operating system image from the Cayman site and flash it onto your router in order for it to properly do PPPoE, but that took all of about 3 minutes to do.)