[svlug] @Home

[Caleb David]

Bob Dehnhardt said:
> 
> I've been on @Home in Fremont for about a year, and I absolutely love it.
> But, Fremont may be a different animal from Hayward in that we're a test
> bed for new tech from TCI, and as a result have static IPs and an optional
> proxy. My understanding is that most other areas have DHCP and enforced
> proxy service.

I've had the service in Pleasanton (Calif) since March this year and
aside from local infrastructure problems the service has been well
worth the price.  I, too, run servers from a Linux box which is doing
IP masq for my internal network but there's barely any traffic
associated with them... a couple mushes and half a dozen private
mailing lists for a friend.

As for the DHCP/proxy stuff, after _many_ conversations with
semi-informed/intelligent tech support people at @Home, the consensus
is that only very new installations in the bay area will have
(suffer?) this fate.  It's also completely dependent on the type of
modem they stick you with.. if you get the older, 'less reliable'
(their words) motorola you get a non-DHCP address (this is what I have
and the modem flakes out every 3 months or so and I lose service for
an hour); if you get the newer motorola, the modem keeps the IP
address (you plug it into a hub if need be; your PC gets a different
address) and you're stuck with DHCP.. however, after asking directly,
I was told that DHCP addresses are statically assigned and don't
change between connections.. presumably because their infrastructure
associates your nodename with account information, etc. So it's not
all bad, assuming they know what they're talking about.

I turned off my use of their proxy server the very day they configured
my connection.. they recently sent out an email saying they've noticed
this and would people please configure their browser(s) to use the
proxy setup 'for better performance'.  Things work better, the less I
depend on their network services (dns, proxy, etc). Although my DNS
server tends to be inexplicably slow it doesn't bug me enough to
troubleshoot it.. I set it up only because @Home's servers were going
down too often. Slower is better than not at all. :)

For what it's worth, TCI is more or less just providing the
transmission medium; otherwise, you're dealing with @Home. Last I
heard, TCI doesn't have a significant stake in @Home. Blame the right
people for the broken stuff.


On a related but different topic, anyone gotten ipautofw working with
Linux 2.1.110?  I'm trying to get to update.symantec.com via ftp from
a machine behind the ip masq host and it causes problems because
'update' is multihomed.  I have ipautofw compiled into the kernel and
have the application but I'm told 'protocol not available' when I try
to use it.. /proc/net seems to have all the correct 'files' but still
nothing.  TIA.

~Caleb

--
avatar at very.strange.com





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