television cable internet service

[Derrick Ryalls]

> Greetings fellow B.S.D. enthusiasts.   Recently, I requested 
> installation
> of a television cable at my home in Sacramento, California.  
> The cable operator is Comcast.  I requested connection of the 
> television cable to my computer, which is a service that the 
> operator advertises profusely.  The telephone sales 
> representative assured me that all things are possible, 
> including both a Unix operating system, and an in-house 
> L.A.N.  The installation technician spent some time 
> installing the cable, then attached it through a Motorola 
> DOCSYS modem to the NIC board on the computer.  The computer 
> saw the cable network, but the cable refused to accept a 

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.

> logon request from the computer.  The technician said that he 
> believed that neither B.S.D. nor any other Unix, nor any 
> Microsoft product that could be programmed to act as a server 
> was acceptable.  Has any other person had the same problem?  

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.

> How did you solve it?  If I insist on a B.S.D. connection, 
> how do I locate a B.S.D. friendly internet service provider 
> in Sacramento? If I insist on B.S.D., am I confined to a 56 
> kb Hayes-type telephone modem? Any comments or advice is 
> appreciated.  Lee_Shackelford at dot.ca.gov
> 

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.

In any case, step 1 is to verify connection.  Try going to this website:

http://192.168.100.1  which is commonly cable modem's ips.