[sclug] isp

[Antony Bartlett]

Glad to hear it can be done.  Mandrake seems to still be at the
build source and tinker with config files, sort of level when it comes to
BT Voyagers though (which proved too much for me).  So I get the
impression that mileage may vary... who knows whether distro X is
going to recognise modem Y?  (unless X=Mandrake 9 and
Y=Speedtouch, which you've just said is good)

On the other hand, it's hard to go wrong with an ADSL router.
Mine was only slightly more expensive than my ADSL modem... and
they have other things, besides ease of install going for them.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ifor Lewis" <iforlewis at hotmail.com>
To: <sclug at sclug.org.uk>
Sent: Thursday, September 18, 2003 8:42 PM
Subject: Re: [sclug] isp


>
> >I would say that the only area you have to watch is with Broadband
> >hardware.  When I tried to get my BT Broadband connection working
> >last month the best advice (see below) that I could get here, was to
> >circumvent the problem by getting an ADSL router instead of an
> >ADSL modem.  Which I did -
>
> Up until a couple of months ago when I moved down to Berkshire from
> Birmingham, I had been using BT's Home 500 ADSL service practically since
it
> came out (the engineer fitted it) and had it running fine under Linux
using
> Red Hat 7 and then Mandrake 9.
>
> With Red Hat 7 i installed the source code from a French guy who wrote it
> and had to configure /etc/ppp/peers/adsl and all those other files
needed...
>
> Mandrake 9 has a package speedtouch which copes fine with the Alcatel
> Speedtouch (green bug) USB modem, offers installation and configuration in
> the install procedure and worked flawlessly for me. There are 'official'
> drivers for the Alcatel modem but these should be avoided. Also needed was
> the microcode for the driver which has to be downloaded from the web or
> taken from your windows install.
>
> I had no need to buy a router or any other hardware and it worked fine for
> me.
>
> Nowadays I'm on a crappy dial-up. Oh well, whenever I move I'll buy
> broadband again...
>
> Ifor