On Thursday 05 November 2009 14:40:35 Joe Riopel wrote:
I have been using Charter as well, since they have offered cable broadband access. I did have Verizon DSL before that, for about a year, and I had a horrible experience. My experience with Verizon had nothing to do with my operating system, it had to do with the ancient copper that was in my house.
I do remember having to use Roaring Peguin's PPoE client with Mandrake 7.2. It established a connection at boot. I guess if I had a router in place I wouldn't have had to do that. http://www.roaringpenguin.com/products/pppoe
the westell modems verizon gives out nowadays are basically routers. the days of directly running the PPPoE stack are past. you get a router with unstable firmware that does DHCP/DNS/NAT (and related services) all controllable from a slow web interface. part of the setup is to tell the modem your username & password and it worries about the connection. you can tell it to autoreconnect and thus stay on all the time. while you can bypass all the shitty services by telling the modem to use your own linux router as the DMZ, the actual connection must still be managed in the modem. the other advantage here is that you dont have to worry about the web interface and/or firmware crashing on you when you try to do simple things like reconfigure some network settings. my experience the last few months is that even though ive bypassed all the services (my linux router is the DMZ), the modem sometimes needs to be kicked (i.e. power cycled). this happens about once a month i guess. some of the time, i even need to go in to the web interface and click the "reconnect" link even though the connection is configured as "auto reconnect". -mike