[ale] BellSouth and ADSL (again)...

[Eric Schmenk]

I've got BellSouth ADSL with an external modem connected to a 3-Com NIC that
they supplied.  I dual boot NT and Linux, no problems.  I haven't had any
problems with voice on my line (or an analog modem on another machine)
disconnecting the ADSL modem.  Availablity is probably around 95%.  When it
works, it's great!  I don't know of any way to report ADSL-specific outages
to bellsouth.net (they happen occasionally), or to get acknolegements from
them when they are working on a problem.  In general, most of BellSouth's
employees are clueless about ADSL (or just clueless in general).   I have
never asked them a Linux-specific question.

I recently had a problem when a component in their switching office went
bad.  The component was apparently whatever generates the dial-tone that
lets you dial out.  ADSL still worked, but I couldn't make voice calls.  So,
they switched me to a pair that didn't support ADSL...Then they switched me
back... Then they suggested that I use my cell phone to call my house phone
which would wake up the component in their switching office whenever I
wanted to be able to dial out...  Then, finally, they replaced the defective
component in their switching office.    Meanwhile, I had to deal with a
bunch of people who wouldn't believe that the ADSL modem could work without
a dial-tone, and visa-versa.  Yeesh!   (To be fair to BellSouth, that "use
my cell phone to wake up their component" fix was only supposed to be a
temporary fix, and it worked.)

The only Linux-specific problem I had with BellSouth's ADSL was when I tried
to do an upgrade from Red Hat 6.0 to 6.1 via FTP.  The install disk (even
the revised image) tries to make a connection to the DHCP server and query
it for the host and domain names.  But Bellsouth ADSL requires you to
specify the host and domain name, and the DHCP server apparently just
verifies whatever you specify.  I couldn't find a way to get Red Hat's
install program to let me specify the host and domain names in the first
place.  So, I just FTP'd all of the base and RPM directories to my computer
and did a hard-disk install.  That was kind of inefficient, but it worked.
(Hint: If you do a hard disk install, make sure you have every RPM file, and
only RPM files, in the RPM directory.  If anything doesn't match perfectly,
you get an error.  To their credit, Red Hat lists this as a bug, but I doubt
it will be fixed soon.)

This probably didn't answer anyone's questions, but I feel better after
venting in the second paragraph!

Eric