[Hudlug] Blueyonder Broadband

[Peter Duffy]

On Sat, 2002-09-07 at 16:48, R.I.Kirkcaldy@Bradford.ac.uk wrote:
> It says quite clearly on the website that:
> It is possible to configure Linux to work with blueyonder broadband Internet, 
> however our installers will not connect to a PC running Linux, and 
> unfortunately we are unable to offer any technical support to users choosing to 
> run this operating system

I've had a Blueyonder cable link for about 18 months now. When they came
to install it, I let them put the Blueyonder stuff on the win98 system
on my main machine. However, as soon as the installers were out of the
door, I changed over to the setup which I'm still using at present:
accessing the service via a dedicated masquerading firewall machine
running Linux. It's just an old Pentium I/166 box with two Ethernet
cards, running Red Hat 6.2. The public interface talks to the cable
modem via a 5-port hub (so that I can put other machines on the public
side, if I wish); the private interface talks via another hub to my
internal network. The firewall machine uses dhcpcd (NB not the same as
dhcpd) to talk to Blueyonder's dhcp server and get the current public IP
address and other info (such as the current DNS servers): dhcpcd
automatically updates /etc/resolv.conf and the IP configuration, and
also runs a script which updates the firewall configuration with the
latest info, and restarts the firewall. It all runs fine, and seems very
robust and reliable.

It can be a problem trying to get technical support: if I admit that a
Linux box is talking direct to Blueyonder, some of the TS staff just
stonewall me. I've partially got round this by telling them that I don't
want support for Linux, just for the network problems, and that all they
have to do is tell me to run the diagnostics that they would normally
use for a windoze box, and I'll translate them into Linux terms and feed
them back the results. (I have to say that, overall, my interactions
with their tech. support staff have not been particularly elucidating or
satisfactory: in most cases, I diagnose the problem myself and tell them
what's wrong. The real problem is convincing them that the problem is in
the network and not in my Linux firewall!! (I had a particularly
entertaining conversation with one gentleman who, after informing me
that it was my lucky day because he was the one person in the TS
department who understood Linux, told me that, in order to prove that
the problem wasn't in my box, what I needed to do was to de-install
TCP/IP from the Linux system ...)