[ILUG] Naive ADSL/WiFi questions (long (sorry!))?

[Timothy Murphy]

On Fri 22 Jun 2007, Michael Watterson wrote:

> It's a pointless argument. You don't need windows for anything to do
> with an ADSL modem. The installers I know (who are rarely sent as ADSL
> is self instal) have their own laptops. Indeed most would not know what
> to do with ifconfig as most don't know about Windows's ipconfig /renew
> command either.

I must confess, as the person who started what seems like an infinite thread,
that I was wrong in my comment about ADSL modems.
I had forgotten that Mr O'Reilly send me a new Netopia ADSL modem
a couple of years ago, out of the goodness of his heart.
This is indeed accessible from the web.
(Except that I changed the IP address, in order to program a Linksys WRT54GL,
and have forgotten what I changed it to ...)

The original Alcom ADSL modem supplied by Eircom
(at the time of their first public ADSL offer)
did indeed require Windows to be running
when the engineer came to install it.

Incidentally, several institutions I occasionally try to communicate with
not only require you to be running Windows,
but also require you to be using Internet Explorer.
(Goodbody's is one that springs to mind.
Also if you query the Bank of Ireland online service
they aks if you are running IE,
and if you are not they say they cannot help you.)

But the contributors to this correspondence
seem to meet an utterly different species of help desk to me.
The very idea of discussing Linux networking,
or indeed any kind of networking,
is completely alien to my experience.

I recently had a nightmare episode trying to get ADSL working
in the UK, on a Onetel/Carphone Warehouse line.
After waiting 4 hours to get through
I certainly did not want to discuss the niceties of Linux.
(I never succeeded, but by a miracle while playing with my Linux laptop
I found the lady next door had a WiFi connection
with no encryption or indeed any firewall.
Fortunately my sister-in-law - whose line I was trying to connect -
walked the neighbour's dog every morning,
and the neighbour was only too happy to share her WiFi line.
The sister-in-law still gets letters regularly from Onetel telling her
how marvellous broadband is.)

As I said, you people seem to live in a different world to me,
where ISPs are only too happy to enter into philosophical discussions
at the drop of a hat.

My daughter actually worked (very briefly) for Dell Help Desk,
and they had strict rules for conversations
(which had to finish within a specified time).
IIRC, you had to start by asking if the customer had put the 3-pin plug in,
and switched it on ...
A discussion of Linux would be as likely as one about Kierkegaard.





>
> I have an old DOS box in attic for programing Mobile Radios (even a 486
> is  to fast for the SW to work) and an old Win98 box to program
> Satellite receivers via serial port (Can't get the SW to work on
> anything else). Such boxes are practically free, people chucking them out.
>
> These are just cheap tools. Having them implies nothing about support
> for Linus or Bill.
>
> Personally I'm greedy.  I have two laptops, one with Ubuntu & one with a
> five year old XP (never reinstalled) running an older Debian on
> VMplayer. I find it convenient to cut and paste between Linux and XP.
>
> I've no plan at all to deploy Vista as it seems to have nothing I want.
>
> I'm not here to be a the slave on any OS, they are convenient tools to
> do what I want. Hence my firewall used to be NT4.0 & Wingate on a P90
> because that was a free & reliable solution (someone else paid for both
> SW). Now it's ClarkConnect on CentOS. One used Windows GUI on the box to
> set rules but now I do it anywhere on my LAN in a Browser window using
> Https connection.
>
> Keeps the flames burning, great amusement without the usenet Poorn Adverts.
>
> --
> Mike



-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland