[GLLUG] Broadband: Bethere -> Sky

[James Hawtin]

Well I got switched to Sky yesterday, and to be frank it isn't bad at all.

Before I was on ADSL, now I am on FTTC (vdsl). Before I could not get 
ADSL2 to my house so I only got 6mb down .5 mb up, now I get 55Mb down 
and 18 Mb up.

The problem with my FTTC install was that it was a self install, so I 
was just sent an all in one modem/route SR102 from sky. Knowing this was 
likely to happen i bought an openreach HG612 from ebay for a tenner. So 
during the install I just connected their black box, so the technication 
had something to test against, and I could ping it from work by 11am 
(Static ip worked!). Then I connected the openreach box to he phone line 
and the SR102 with lan mode (bottom nic with green line under it), this 
did not work at first, I assume there is a timeout on the system, after 
dinner it was up and running just fine. Finally I had already used 
Wireshark to extract the user/password from the SR102, as soon as I got 
it. I programmed this into my firewall dhclient config (only change 
needed for BE) and removed the SR102 and used switched over to my 
openbsd firewall, after another timeout everything was up and running. *

After my install I did get a confused email from SKY about using my own 
router, however the instructions were for ADSL not VDSL. The bebox does 
not do VDSL, so they were a bit dumb. Also the suggest to keep the be 
box working you "MUST" turn off bridgemode (the one thing most people 
want on BE) and then program in the password they tell you, rather than 
putting send dhcp-client-identifier into your DHCP config, as SKY use 
exactly the same system for authentication as BE did, just you need to 
send a password.

So all in all I am quite pleased, for 1 year, I have for the same price 
as I was paying with BE and 10 times the download speed 30 times the 
upload speed and still get a static IP address.

James

* as a clean up I change the max-mss on my firewall to the full 1500 
mtu, from the adsl safe 1452 value which improved this a little from 43 
to 55 with my firewall, same as with the direct attached SR102.
** I also spoofed the mac on my SR102, don't think this is necessary, 
orginally I just change the mac on the vlan however this caused problems 
as openbsd does not put the nic into promiscuous mode,  so I was very 
confused as to why things only worked when I had tcpdump on!
*** For extra credit I then uploaded the hacked firmware to enable the 
second nic on the HG612 so I could collect stats about my line and 
monitor it.