Hi everyone, finally I am at high speed connection, wooohooo. well, it isn't T1 or something, but a descent 608/128 from speakeasy. Hmmm, and it is a static IP, he-he, maybe not he-he I can be easily banned from any boards I've become an enemy with, but linuxquestion is my friend, and I'll stay friends with all of you. I am waiting for my free PS2 to ring my door bell.
See you.

Welcome to the fast lane, my friend!

I have had broadband now for... ooh, a couple of months! Unfortunately I shall be losing it again shortly I have got a BB connection whilst I'm at Uni (living with my bro who's recently got a cable connection), but I will be on 6 months work placement back home where I've only got a 36k connection. Hey, ho - I shall, at least, be in schools, so I should (hopefully) have relatively fast connection speeds there - but I will be forced into using Windows, I bet!

Congrants buddy!

Why not, good idea Neo, a thread about broadband wackiness:

Three houses and a few years ago I had Telocity, the jokers that became DirectTVDSL, they shipped me their little router in a box, 1 free static IP, cheap monthly rates and an average 800-ish/128-ish due to the lame copper in the neighborhood. That's when I set up my first linux box so we could share a connection through the house and not have to do anything funky with Windows proxying. This was back when those little Linksys router dealy-woo-hoos barely existed and were still $200 a piece, which was also the time that the bottom dropped out of the machine market and you could buy the fastest athlon: 1.2Ghz I think then, for something like $120. So we lovingly surrendered the old house P1 200 to the powers of RedHat and put together a NAT box.

And then things were flaky: DSLAM would cut out for seemingly no reason every few hours, remain shaky for days on end, clear up for no reason at all... After two months of chatting with the tech support clowns, I actually had to admit that one of the first things they grumble about really did effect the line. You know that nearly old-wives-tale grumbling about how halogen lamps mess with DSLAM? We had one, in the bathroom, at the back of the house, turned off. After unplugging it, everything cleared up. Plugging it in sent the router into a tizzy. Turning it on! well that just took our flaky connection and squished it flat. From then on we occasionally used the lamp to torture each other.

A year later I made the grave mistake of moving outside of DSL range, into the realm of a cable company. 1 cable company, that had one of those apartment complex based monopolies. They required Premium service before they would sell you a cable internet connection. Back then I was pretty poor and the apartment itself was pretty expensive so we just gave up on it and lived off of a dial-up LAN for a few weeks.

Then some friends moved in 2 apartments over and set up a wireless LAN. For a while that meant our only connection was from the pantry in the back of the kitchen on my laptop, which was the only wireless capable machine in the house. That surrendered to a full LAN when I got one of those desktop PLX cards and set up a wireless NAT box. Then one day I was fiddling with some beta drivers and handed that card a little too much voltage. This was the week after my Computer Science major buddy the apartement over had his Airport eat it in a grave mistake. News to all you CS majors, there are these things known as surge protectors. Then another friend picked up 9 laptops for free; I don't want to go into how, but it was legit! If you rip apart a dead Mac Airport you can yank out a completely functional Lucent Silver 802.11b pcmcia card. Upgrade the firmware, drop it in a Linux laptop with a wired cheap little 3c589 you picked up for $10, set up a network with another likewise bizarred laptop in 802.11b ad-hoc mode and you're back in business. That little kludge ran without much of a hitch for the next 5 months... and then my friend forgot to pay the cable bill.

The next time I moved I had 1 requirement: DSL range. The first thing I did when I was looking at apartments was plug the rental office number into the Speakeasy "distance to CO" locator. Now I'm happy with my 1.5/256 Megapath connection and a choking 5 static IPs.

I've actually got two other broadband stories before that, but they mostly involve windows and internal (blech!) modems.

Cheers,

Finegan

Wow!
I've had DSL connection for a few years as well. I started with JunoExpress, got a dedicated line installed and a SpeedStream 5260 Efficient Networks DSL modem, it used DHCP, and my linux setup was using the full power of broadband, then in the winter 2001 Juno had vanished, and earhtlink took over, they didn't even asked me if I wanted to switch, one day I got an e-mail from Juno stating that I might be experiencing DSL outages for a couple of days due to some switches upgrade, but I could still use dial-up, next think I know my DSL link went down, and I my RH setup wasn't recognizing my regular US Robatics modem, so I was cut off, I called a couple of times to Juno, and the last conversation I had confirmed that Juno is no longer would provide DSL luxuary for me, and I have to expect an e-mail from Earthlink for further details, well the e-mail came a couple of hours later, telling me my temporary user ID and password, and asking me to log on to earthlink.net or call earthlink tech support for furhter information - Spy Like Us I must say. Then there was PPPoE nightmares, really I had no idea how I was going to able to use WinPoet client on my linux setup (well I was dumb and I had no idea there was rp-pppoe back then), so it continued and like in October I said I've had it with earthlink and now I am with speakeasy, so far so good - I think RPMfind made a right choice having speakeasy as their web hosting house.
BTW, after earthlink took over the DSL signal was routed through my regular phone line (previously I had a wire coming upstairs from the basement and then cat-5 cable running through entire apartment to a separate phone jack where I plugged in my modem), so I have like 50+ feet cat-5 cable, and I am still using the same SpeedStream5260 modem I used three years ago with Juno, never had any issues with it yet.