ADSL update, notes

[Jason Gerry <jason@mindspring.com>]

It's still great, and I'm better off than I was on Monday.

Now, instead of having my Mac directly hooked up to the ADSL modem, I've
got my nice little Linux box (P166, 40 megs RAM) running as a gateway. I
notice absolutely no slowdown in network services at all, and it's only
running 2 16-bit ISA Ethernet cards. It also uses practially no system
resources on the Linux side. Really amazing.

Interesting side note: Bellsouth is attempting to keep you from changing
machines around at your end of your ADSL connection by doing a very odd
thing. When your service is installed, you have to provide them with the
hardware address of your ethernet device. I suspected why; now I know for
sure.

Basically, their DHCP server will not respond if the device that's doing
the DHCP hunt doesn't have the hardware address that you specified to them.
So  when they say you get one machine on your end, they mean one machine.

Also, don't mention that you're running Linux on your end. It will only
cause problems, because it's unsupported. I told them I was running NT, and
I knew how to set it up, and all they needed to do was change the hardware
address in their database. They did, and it works fine.

Next project: VPN (Virtual Private Network) via PPTP from my Linux box at
work, through the firewall, to my Linux box at home. Once I can do that, I
pretty much don't have to go to the office. Ever.

Happy ADSLing!

jason