Well, I have had my cable modem for two weeks now. I had lots of trouble getting an installer to come out, the cable company called and according to them rescheduled for a week later with my permission, which was not true.
After a rather heated discussion with her supervisor, they agreed to come the same day and did. The modem worked fine when the installers left (5 hours later), but I was unable to reach outside their network. Most of this was teething problems with Arutzi Zahav, they have no idea what it is like to be an ISP and what people want when they call for customer service. People don't want to hear that it will be fixed soon, meaning after shabbat, for a call at 13:00 on Friday, or that everyone has a problem and we'll fix it as soon as possible (which meant 3 days) as I had with digital cable. A good thing is that my cable connection was marginal, and they replaced a long run of coax to get the modem to work, now the digital cable is perfect. Once it was installed I had a balagan with netvision. In the end my son Paul (anyone need a computer nerd/junior sysadmin?) got a response of "it's a linux problem, the linux support person will be in tomorrow night". I told him to call back and explain the he could traceroute out of the linux box to somewhere in their network and they should fix it. A few tries and he got somone who understood the problem was in the network and not my linux box and was able to get the problem fixed. We also could tell that it was their problem, as DNS worked, so that "traceroute www.cnn.com" found the IP of www.cnn.com but could not get the data for the page. (HINT: call the aDSL group at Netvision). Generaly performace is good. I can get 80k BYTES per second from a Netvision server. Web pages and data that is in their cache or netnews articles "fly" down. It takes less time to download Microsoft I.E. 6 for a windows machine (5 minutes for a 21 meg "full" install) than it does to do the install. As always, stuff from the U.S. at 8pm, is slooooow. To keep it linux relevant, here are my linux based questions: 1. To use the network, you have to logon to your ISP, in my case Netvision. This is down via web browser by going to page which runs a Javascript program to log you on. It works on any windowing browser (IE on windows, Netscape, Opera and Konquerer on Linux), but does not work using lynx. It needs to be automated, probaly with a PERL script using the LWP, but that is beyond me. :-( Anyone got it working? The connection drops randomly, usually between 4am when Paul goes to bed and 6am when my wife gets up and sometime over shabbat. Since I use it for a mail and news feed, I would like to have the machine reconnect automaticaly. 2. I was getting burst (1 kilobyte of data) rates of 80kbytes per second on the linux machine, which degraded to 800 bytes per second, while windows machines were getting 80k consistant throughput. I had to reduce the MTU on the ethernet interface for the cable modem. Not wanting to spend a lot of time determing the exact one, my second try of 1200 worked fine, and I left it. 3. I am involved in a VPN test using Netvison. Anyone else? Geoff. -- Geoffrey S. Mendelson Bloomberg L.P., BFM (Israel) 2 hours ahead of London, 7 hours ahead of New York. Tel: 972-(0)3-754-1158 Fax 972-(0)3-754-1236 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
