dsl with router

Hurray -- SBC Yahoo on a Router!

Cruising the boards in frustration, I've just spent a week fighting to
get my ultra-cheap ($31) DSL internet to share around the house on a
router. SBC ships (for free) a cheap, no-longer-supported DSL modem,
and my LinkSys router isn't exactly an aristocrat.

My feeling is that people are having this trouble hooking ANY DSL
modem to ANY router. I think I have a solution.

You people who have knocked the hardware were, I think, wrong. The
solution is understanding (and therefore not using any of) the SBC
software. The one bit from SBC that you absolutely must use is the
full user name and password their welcome letter assigns to you.
(These are changeable later at the SBC website, I understand.)

Here, then, is the successful workaround. Some of this may not be
necessary, but I haven't time to redo it all a dozen times to see
which steps I can skip.

Take the cheap DSL modem. Take the cheap router. Using ethernet cable,
hook up the ethernet card in back of the first computer to the #1
output of the router. Hook the internet input of the router to the
output of the DSL modem. Hook the input of the DSL modem (now using
phone cable) to the DSL output of the Y-filter. Plug the input pigtail
of the phoneline filter into the phone jack. (Later, just plug in the
extra computers and they will get internet (if they have the same
limited software running).)

Now here comes the interesting part, the way to do what SBC doesn't
want you to do. Turn off (or unplug) both the DSL modem and the
router. Boot the computer, without ANY SBC software. If it
automatically loads some, do a Start/Run/MsConfig/Startup and uncheck
anything that smells like SBC or DSL that you may have accepted from
their evil CD. No need to erase or uninstall it; just make sure it
won't load. Then reboot, with no DSL software at all.

Put the CD from the router people in, fire it up, and look for their
user manual. You can let the setup.exe wizard carry you through this
stuff, but it works cleaner and more reliably with the step-by-step,
the user manual in a window while you tinker.

Now at last, turn on (or plug in) the router, then the DSL modem.
Their various lights may act kinda sick, but we'll fix that. Press
(and maybe hold, check the manual) the switch that resets the router
to default everything. Look up the router's home address in the user
guide, which for mine is http://192.168.1.1. Open up a browser.

Make sure all the proxy tools are out of the browser. In IE it's
Tools/ InternetOptions/ Connections/ LAN Settings/ (uncheck all 3
boxes). In Mozilla (like Netscape) it's Edit/ Preferences/ Advanced/
Proxies/ ConnectDirectly. In other browsers it will be similar.

Check your tray toys, and remember if they put a proxy (like a
translator who tells you everything but the naughty words) between the
internet and you. My ad-stopper, Proxomitron, does act as a proxy and
I made it exit. My firewall, ZoneAlarm free version, uses no proxy so
I left it in. (Later, try reversing this to bring the proxy users back
to work.)

Now it gets even more interesting. We are going to leap from the
computer into the router, and then from the router into the internet.

In that open browser, type the router's address. Hit enter and wait
a bit. If your router really got reset to its out-of-the-box vanilla
settings, it SHOULD pop open a sign-in box for you. The entries are
simple and in the user guide; for me they were leave-blank for the
user name and "admin" for the password. Then comes a setup screen. Now
the chips in the router box are filling your screen.

Leave the host name and domain name blank (they are cable items, not
DSL). The three addresses of your LAN (local area network, used on
wires from the router into your computers) should already be there,
and you can leave them alone. You have to choose a WAN (wide area
network, used on wires from the router out to the internet) connection
type, and for SBC it will be PPPoE.

When you say PPPoE, the router realizes that your internet privider
(SBC) is going to want your username and password. So, without
mentioning dear little SBC, it asks for them. You type in, not the
"admin" stuff or what you use at the internet bank or porn site, but
exactly the words SBC sent you in their letter. THAT is the big secret
everybody has been missing.

You also have to choose "keep alive" or "connect on demand max. idle
time", and here I had some trouble. Keep Alive, the obvious choice,
seemed to let the router die when the computer was turned off.
MaxIdle=0, another likeable choice, failed the same way (for me). When
I set the router to MaxIdle=45 minutes, it stayed alive through
reboots. (If it torpedoes me later, I'll set idle to 999 minutes (16+
hours), and maybe have the computer turn itself on daily.)

Hitting "apply" (or OK or Done or whatever) was also troublesome.
Again, it only worked when the router had recently been lobotomized to
its default. With the wrong ID words, of course, it always failed.
Once the "apply" was done, I clicked over to the "status" tab (may be
different on yours) and clicked "connect" (unless the status was
already "connected").

Then, with fear, I hit the home button and, gee whiz, the New York
Times.