swbell DSL

[Lou Brown]

This could be BS; here is my DSL story.  I had my ADSL installed in
9/99.  I have static IPs and reside in Overland Park.  I am running all
*NIX boxes in a M$ free household.  Swbell had asked me a few days
before the installation date what OS I was running; I said Linux.  To my
suprise the woman on the phone had actually heard of it.  I told them I
would provide a sacrificial NT box so they could verify everything
worked.

I had to take vacation from work so I could sit at home all day and wait
for the swbell guys to show up.  A few minutes before 3 PM they called
to tell me they were on their way.  Two guys showed up and wired the
diplexer to the cable entrance in my apartment closet.  They then
checked the line with a protocol analyzer and verified my download speed
to be 1.3 Mbps (cool, much faster than the 384 kbps they guarantee) with
a 3000 ft length from the swbell exchange.  Take note that they did not
know anything about my ip address.  They were going to call the swbell
internet services (located in California) but I had obtained this info a
few days before.  One guy looked worried; he mentioned Linux and said he
had some instructions in his truck on how to set it up.  I had the
sacrificial NT box (running Linux the day before) ready to go.  I tried
getting tcp/ip configured on the NT box and after several re-boots it
was still not working.  He fooled around with it yet no success.  I said
"screw this".  I plugged the wire into my Sparc IPX (running Linux), set
the IP, and was pinging 1 minute later.

The conclusion of my story is that the sacrificial box running piece of
sh!t M$ NT was a waste of time.  The installation which would have been
a 30 min job took 1 hour because of piece of sh!t NT.  They did have a
laptop running piece of sh!t windoze 95 that they could have used.

Make sure you get all your IPs and other info written down before
installation day.  You should be fine with static IPs, but I have used
the DHCPD on Linux and it worked fine.