[Glastonbury] Cable [LONG REPLY] - shorter this time :)

[Andrew M.A. Cater]

On Sun, Aug 03, 2003 at 10:56:12AM -0700, Maurice Onmaplate wrote:

<very big snip>
> plus phone

Not relevant here but OK.  If Telewest <-> Telewest is still cheap
you can try ringing me on 01242 703605 after 20.00 or so each night :)
Mailing lists / email can be rather impersonal and lead to 
misunderstandings.  A word or two may help establish "real life"
understanding where 1500 words of email confuse.

Initial reality/sanity check again:  you have four machines in total.

One laptop, one Apple of some sort, one Windows XP PC and an elderly
computer running Windows 98 which may become a Linux box.  You also
have three printers.  My default assumption is that one of those will
be Mac only and connected to the Mac.  Where are the others: how do you
want to connect them/place them?

> 
> > The modem I have has three connections on the back. 
> > The topmost one
> > is an Ethernet socket for a Cat5 Ethernet connector
> > (looks slightly like
> > an oversized telephone handset plug).
> 
> yes..and thats the one connected to pc, or via the
> hub.

OK.  Let's simplify this to the easiest trouble-shooting problem.
>..BTW the change of the network card to get the
> older machune working seems to prevent the workgroup
> working...is this because it's not the same internal
> network address?
> 
> can have several MAC's registered, 6 I believe
>
Not sure how many you can have on the go at any one time.
This is the whole point.  You get the chance to register more
than one MAC only so that if, for example, your first network card 
goes for a Burton you can register another.  At any one time, as a 
home user, you can normally only have one connected to the cable modem 
AIUI. [Hence the reason for a router to spoof your address and provide
a connection point/gateway for your internal network of machines :) ]
> 
> Is this due to the fact I can only home-network cards
> set to the 'internal network' address?
> 

Let's simplify this to the lowest factor to get the cable working.

Connecting one machine successfully will make it much more 
straightforward to decouple the problems.  Once you've got
one machine working, we can then work on building the appropriate
infrastructure to get the others connected / working.

1.) Can you get Telewest to "de-dupe" you?  Are you sure that your
Ethernet card's MAC address isn't registered twice inadvertently
and that the "other person" isn't in fact you - i.e. you/the 
cable installer registered the card and you tried to re-register it?


2.) When the Telewest guy left, did the cable work?

I presume he used your Windows machine to check it out.

Get the same machine, with the same card, cabled in the same way
and try again.

If both 1) and 2) fail: put a different network card in whichever
machine is going to connect first and ring Blueyonder to register that
MAC.  One way or another, we need a machine to connect to Blueyonder
to prove the cable modem etc. works.

You may also want to contact Nick Irwin - who has also managed to do
all this successfully and is in Devon somewhere.  See earlier mailing
list post for details of this.

Andy