[Herts] NTL Cable Modems and Linux

[Neil Youngman]

My cable modem is now up and running. It was installed on Saturday and I 
originally intended to set it up on USB on Win98 and if I could get it 
working on Linux I would have saved myself the price of a cheap NIC. While 
setting it up I assumed that I could still dial up as a fallback. On Saturday 
I read the documentation before starting and found that as soon as I had the 
cable modem set up, my account would be converted to a cable modem account. 
i.e. I could only have dial up access on a separate account from the cable 
modem.

Anyway today I got a cheap and cheerful RTL8139 NIC for 12 quid from PC 
Efficient and everything's more or less working. Installation of the NIC was 
a right pain on win98. On Linux the installation was a breeze, but I'm not 
sure what the canonical way of configuring DHCP on Debian is. Currently I 
just run the pump DHCP client manually. 

Anyway the point of all this is that as long as you've got a 'doze dual boot 
the NTL cable modems seem pretty easy to use with Linux, bearing in mind of 
course that I've only been on for a few hours.

Remarkably I was even able to get through to customer services in under 5 
minutes to cancel my 2nd phone line.

Neil