Installed the Cable Modem

The cable guy came by on Tuesday and installed the cable modem and digital cable. (I'm frustrated with the digital, but that's for a different forum.) Last night, I hooked up the cable modem to the big network. I only took about 40 minutes to set up and configure everything.

I had thought that I would have to ask my router to spoof the MAC address of whatever PC was used for the configuration (such as what I helped my neighbor do with his setup), and that my SpeadStream 2614 router did not have this feature. I was wrong on both counts.

Insight doesn't offer instructions on using routers with their equipment, and they have the setup instructions aimed for the technical novice. However, it was pretty easy to augment their manual instructions to include the router.

My DSL setup with Verizon and work included a static IP address, so I changed the router to grab a dynamic address. Then I just followed the Insight instructions (which basically set up a proxy connection to their servers and nothing else). I registered the modem and it grabbed the router's MAC address - everything worked as expected.

After rebooting the modem, router, and browser as instructed, I tried to bring up a web page. No luck. None of the URLs were working. A quick check of the router's status page showed the DNS settings still pointing to the name servers at work, even thought I had selected the Dynamic IP setting. One would expect it to get the nameserver and gateway settings from DHCP. I tried everything to clear out the DNS and gateway addresses, but the SpeadStream wasn't allowing a blank entry in those fields. It was 8:55 and West Wing was coming up, so I hit the factory reset on the router. It took about 20 seconds to change the password back to my secret word and change the one security setting (ignore PING requests), and the DNS and gateway settings were cleared.

The last step was to change the SMTP server setting on each machine. I had been using the work server, but they have blocked outside servers from using that service, and I'm now on the outside. I switched all 4 to the InsightBB mail server.

It does seem to download a little faster than DSL, as I expected. The Bandwidth Test at PC Pit Stop showed a download rate of 2,300 kbps, while the DSL line came in around 690 kbps.

While preparing this post, I found these instructions that pretty much explain the whole thing.

(It took longer to write this post than it did to do the work!!)

(The Blogger spell check wanted to replace 'nameserver' with 'manservant'.)