Fucking Cable Idiots

[ravan]

So, these jerks at Comcast "lease" me a brand new cable modem for $3 a month. But the stupid thing won't work with a router/firewall - IOTW, it doesn't really work. So Fuzzy, who's been dealing with them since he's home during the day when their "support" idiots are available, says we have to transfer his account into my name, and then "merge" them by physically going to a Comcast office, so we can use his cable modem which does work with a router.

Excuse me? What the fuck kind of lame shit is that? I'm not connecting jack diddly squat to a public network without multiple layers of protection. No firewall, no go. Yeah, my Windoze box has "ZoneAlarm", but that's a back stop. My goddamn printer is a network printer. If I just use a switch, that means any fucking idiot downstream of the neighborhood router can print to it! No Goddamn way!

So, I'll either end up doing the "merge accounts" bullshit, or buy my own damn cable modem that actually works.

The idea of a cable modem that doesn't work with a router downstream is insane. It's a way of making life easier for script kiddies to assemble botnets, and spammers to use your PC as a spew source. I wonder how much the spam kings paid Motorola to do this.

I am seriously and severely pissed off, at both Comtrash *and* Fuzzy, because of the complete fubarred mess that this has become. I signed up for service nearly two months ago, and am still suffering with flakey, slow, and intermittent DSL.

EDIT I tried it, instead of Fuzzy, with the proper reboot of the modem and then a release and renew of the router, and it worked just fine. Pissed Fuzzy off. I guess that's why I get paid for this, and he doesn't.

Comtrash is still lame, because they didn't know jack about it, but at least I don't have to make a useless pilgrimage to comcast. Sheesh.

Comments

Re: MAC Address Clone

[lwood.livejournal.com]

Even that, I found out, isn't really necessary if the cable modem/bridge is off power long enough to forget the MAC that's been registered (a minute or few): it'll simply register the router's MAC as the One True MAC and get on with life.

We're about to upgrade to business cable modem here because our DSL has become quite unreliable--and for that we're told that our modem/bridge gets replaced by a modem/router -- which is fine, two of our five IP's go for the server, a third for our happy Linksys with its 802.11g, and two to dangle in the breeze.

Five IP's... a /29 and we're happy for it.

I remember when snugharbor.com owned an entire Class C, which young whippersnappers would call a /24, and we thought that a fine few acres...and now a /29 seems nice.

-- Lorrie, feeling like a net.dinosaur. 8-P

PS: Hey you kids, GET OFFA MY LAWN!

Re: MAC Address Clone

[trogula.livejournal.com]

The MAC address re-registration is a hit or miss thing - it depends on the configuration of the upstream switches (which isn't consistant, based on my experience). I've seen installations where this works, and I've seen installations where this doesn't (and had to make a call to comcast to register the replacement MAC address).

At my own home, I've got Comcast. Experience here has shown that the MAC address of the system behind the cable modem will re-register, but the MAC address of the cable modem is hard coded into their switches - when I had to replace my cable modem itself, I had to call tech support to register the new MAC address. At my mom's home, both the modem and the computer MAC address auto-registered.

Let me know how the business cable setup works for you - I've been considering moving to it myself.

Re: MAC Address Clone

[lwood.livejournal.com]

I'll keep all y'all posted... 'cos wow the current situation sucks spiky demon balls through swizzle sticks.