[CLUE-Tech] ATT@home install experience with Debian.

[Matthew Porter]

My AT&T at home cable modem service was installed on Saturday, so I thought I'd offer some notes about the experience.

Overall?  Smooth.  As.  Silk.  What few hitches occurred were quickly remedied.

@Home Installation:  I opted for "basic" installation.  The tech showed up a few minutes early. He made the necessary connections at the pole behind my house, and at the back of the house itself.  (I already had a straight line of cable running from the computer room and out the back of the house, which made things simpler all round).  Then he came inside, plugged in the modem and connected it to the computer.  A little trouble getting a connection, apparently due to some squirrel damage to the cable drop from the pole.  The modem eventually established a connection, but the tech suspected it might not be reliable or fast enough, so he put in an order to have the problem at the pole checked and repaired. Another tech came to take care of that later that same day.  Not only is the cable modem working well now, but also my cable TV reception is improved.

Getting the service to work with Debian:  Astonishingly easy, including my first kernel recompile. (Thanks for last week's KISS session, Dan!)

As I mentioned on the list last week, I was a little concerned about support for my new Linksys NIC.  I'd been warned that I'd need the very latest version of the Tulip driver source, so I downloaded that before compiling my kernel.

The compile choked on the new tulip source.

So, I went back and tried the tulip driver source that Debian ships with the 2.2.19 kernel source.  It worked beautifully, and supports the Linksys lne100tx v 5.1 just fine.

After booting with the new kernel, I grabbed the "etherconf" utility via dselect.  Thanks to this, it was insanely simple to get the computer talking to the net.  Within minutes I was online, with very sweet ping times.  The only weird thing was that it changed my local hostname to "Progeny," so I had to change that back in a few /etc files.  (Wonder where etherconf comes from?)

Conclusions: (1) AT&T at home has good installation service, in my experience; (2) don't necessarily believe all the warnings on the net about needing the very latest driver for this or that; and (3) use etherconf.  Oh, and (0) compiling the kernel is fun.


 --Matt.

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Matthew Porter
Golden, Colorado

mfporter at mindspring.com
mfporter at c-creature.com