On Sat, Jun 21, 2003 at 01:10:06PM -0700, Ric Otte wrote: > I saw that SBC/Yahoo had a DSL offer of $30 a month, and I called them > up to ask if it would work with Linux. The woman at tech support > confidently assured me, over and over, that it would not work with > Linux. I spoke to her a long time, trying to figure out why it wouldn't > work. She said that since they use pppoe and not dhcp, I couldn't get > an ip address with a dhcp client. But Debian has a pppoe package, and > there are also things like rp-pppoe. Although she could not explain to > me why it wouldn't work, she was absolutely positive it wouldn't.
There is some truth to what the woman told you. I just a couple of weeks ago switched over to SBC/Yahoo. I spent an extra few bucks and got the 1.2Mb/256Kb service and it has been rock solid at exactly those rates. I'm running Debian, but I'm connecting via a D-Link DI-614+, so I'm not using Debian's pppoe. I did not do the initial connection via the D-Link, because they do not give you a user-id and you cannot connect without one. Instead, I initially used their install CD on a Windows-XP machine. They install a ton of very ugly garbage on your machine and offer no way of skipping that step even though you actually need none of it. Doing it their way, you cannot get a user ID nor set your password (both required for pppoe of course) until you get past the software install step. After I got my service working on the Windows box, I configured the D-Link to use pppoe and it works fine. I then uninstalled all the Yahoo-supplied software from my Windows-XP machine and reconfigured it to connect via lan. My Debian box required some exim tweaking to use the SBC smtp server and I struggled a bit with that because it requires authentication, but in the end I had a service that's much more stable than the Sprint Broadband that I had before. Fetchmail is set to get my mail every 3 minutes, so the pppoe address has now stayed fixed for a couple of weeks. Also, I set up an account at DynDNS and the D-Link with current firmware uses that automatically, so the lack of a static IP is a non-issue. That was a real concern since I ssh in to my Debian box every day. I initially used ipcheck on Debian, but when I did a firmware update on the router, I discovered that it had added direct support for DynDNS so I killed the cron job I had added for ipcheck. Having said all that, it is possible that a call to support might get you a userID/password. With that, you could skip the garbage installation and configure Debian or a router and be successful, I believe. I just didn't want to deal with them, had a Windows machine handy, and chose what seemed to be the safest course. > The modem/router they give out as part of the deal is a Homeportal > 1000sw. I checked that on the web, and it looks to me as if it uses > pppoe to connect to SBC, and then assigns either static or dynamic ip > addresses to computers plugged into it. It also says that it is Linux > compatible. I got a "free" SpeedStream 5100 as part of the deal. Obviously it works with the DLink. -- Michael Epting ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
