[SWLUG] ntl Broadband and Mandrake 9.1

[Peter Joseph]

On Sat, Mar 13, 2004 at 06:44:48PM -0500, 'o-Dzin Tridral wrote:
> 
> I am interested in changing to Broadband and the simplest way might be
> with our current telephone company ntl.  Apparently everything 'should
> work' and a lot of what I've read seems to indicate that it would.

Been using NTL broadband for years. No problems technically!

> 
> Could anyone tell me what the next step is, once the cable modem is
> plugged into the ethernet port?  Apparently we have to get a temporary
> IP address, and then register for a permanent one.  I'm told that the
> installing engineer will not know what to do.

NTL does NOT provide a static ip address. If you are referring to the
'registration' procedure that you are supposed to go through to get your
cable modem working then I know what you mean. When you use an un
registered cable modem as far as I can determine it will only let you
connect to the NTL registration server, there you have to input all the
details that were sent with a letter. User ID and a pin if I remember
correctly?? It's been a long time since I registered my cable modem.
However the registration software is for windows only.....I have no idea
if there is any way around this. To avoid finding a way around this I
simply registed my cable modem using a Windows installation...hopefully
this option is open to you as i personally dont know of any other way!
(if i recall the windows installation 'software' only directed Internet
Explorer to a registration url which just went through a cgi process, so
prehaps you could just point your Linux browser to this url! However I
only registered once! :D and it was years ago).

Anyway, prehaps my information is out of date and there is no long a
registration or they do it for you. 
Basically all you need to do is run a DHCP client which will receive a
DHCP allocated IP from the cable modem. Once this DHCP allocation
happens you will be on the net and ready to go. I actually plug my modem
into a gateway type machine here which does IP Masq for a few other
machines. (thats the only way to run more than one machine from one
cable modem).

> Does anyone have a recommendations re firewalls etc?

Same setup as you are/were for your dialup. IP Tables or something? 

Peter
-- 
Peter Joseph                               Debian GNU/Linux Maintainer 
kneecaps at shockpulse.co.uk                          kneecaps at debian.org
http://www.shockpulse.co.uk/                    http://www.debian.org/  
   "If there were no god, we would have to invent him." - Voltaire