television cable internet service

[chris corayer]

>To make life easy, I had a windows box laying around for the technician
>to verify a live line with.  Once it was live and he was gone, I
>switched to using a BSD router on the connection.

I did the same here.  Although to be honest, nothing the tech did here
should have made any difference whatsoever.  He plugged in the modem, booted
the computer ( DHCP ), and went into the browser for a couple of minutes.

>Yeah, they are paranoid about servers, but never do anything about them
>until it starts to cost them money.  If they were really strict on the
>no servers policy, they would be able to allow any windows box to
>connect to their network.

The tech didn't mention anything about servers to me.  But in all honesty I
haven't bothered to try and see if they're blocking ports or not.  I would
suspect that they are though.

>BSD should work fine with Comcast.  I am not sure how comcast in your
>area differs from the seattle area, but they should all be BSD friendly.
>The big trouble is that initial service with cable/dsl is rather flaky.
>It usually takes the ISP a month or so to figure out how a network is to
>be expanded or something.

My BSD stuff works fine here.  And yes, for the first couple of months the
service would flake out daily in the early afternoon.  Lately it's been
solid.  Depending on what your needs are, you could also consider a cheap
router ( linksys or others ) as they're down to ~50$ or so.  That's not much
more than a cheap switch at this point, so even if you don't decide to use
it as a router you can use it for your network anyway.  Much of it is point
and click, which may be useful until you learn more about how to fully set
up your BSD box's firewalling and such.  As the DHCP server and NAT are
already built in, this might also be helpful until you get DHCP server set
up on your BSD box as well.

Hope this helps.

-Chris