[ale] W00T!

[Charles Shapiro]

W00T!  We have broadband into the house! I AM A 373314 L1N4X HAX04 D00D!
D0NT M3SS W1TH MY /\/\4D \/\/4B SK177Z!!!!

It took me a few hours on Sunday to set it all up, but I managed
without having some stranger come out to the house and try to connect
his alien machines to my personal, private intranet.  The sunday tech
support dude at SpeedFactory was quite speedy and wise, plus able to
talk to me in complete sentences about what I was doing (e.g. "So can
you set up your machine to do DHCP?"  "Oh yeah, I can handle that". "So
if I changed my password on the web, does that mean that I have to
change it in the router?" "Yeah, you gotta do that too.").  

The whole experience was much less scary than I thought it would be, and
SpeedFactory support gets major props for (1) not panicking 'cause I'm
not a Lose user and (2) not talking down to me or trying to run me
through some kind of script. It took me about five hours to get
everything working, including two hours of thrashing 'til I figured  out
that they'd changed the defaults on the router, an hour fiddling with
the router on my portable directly connected (!), and a couple of hours
configuring my diskless linux firewall to NAT packets, firewall off
everything outside, and provide all of the services my old dial-up
router provided to my internal hosts. SentryCD (
http://sentryfirewall.com/ ) rocks, if anyone's looking for a good
script-driven diskless firewall distro.

-- CHS

("They'll pry my gun from my cold, dead fingers, and they'll pry my hard
drives from beneath the wreckage of my home.")