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Well, I finally have broadband Internet access at home. The AT&T install
guy came over on Friday afternoon, did a bunch of work in the wall, gave
me a digital cable box and left. After a little bit of testing, I found
that the cable box didn’t tune above channel 13 and the cable modem
wouldn’t sync. As it turns out, of the 4 cable wall plates in the
apartment, 3 were for the “house” cable only, and only 1 of them was for
outside cable. We switched the digital cable box over to the outside
cable plate and it was happy. After 3 calls to AT&T, they decided to
send somebody out on Saturday to fix things.

That didn’t go much better. He did some more work in the walls, and got
the modem to sync, but couldn’t get my computer to get a DHCP lease.
Eventually he decided to try the USB connection on the modem instead of
the ethernet, and poof, it works, so he left.

I was a little worried at this point, since I had also purchased this
nice Netgear MR314 Wireless Cable/DSL Router, and intended to use it. I
decided to try configuring my laptop’s ethernet port to the same
ethernet address as the USB side of the cable modem, and hooked it up to
the router, telling the router to use that machine’s ethernet id as the
outside link’s id. Then I hooked it up via ethernet to the cable modem,
and unplugged the USB cord. To my amazement, this worked, and
everything’s been nice and happy since.

So far it seems to be pretty good, I haven’t downloaded anything, but I
can get about a 50ms ping in Counterstrike, which is fine by me.