patriarch wrote:

The best thing to do is ignore their process. Their process is designed
to automate the installation in a standard manner.

Yeah, but I spent two days picking some of the best brains on Earth trying
to figure out how to get the cable modem to do something, to no avail.
After I finally went through the ordeal of setting up Windows far enough to
run their stupid little program, it woke up. I hadn't been doing anything
wrong. Upstream just wasn't talking to me yet because I hadn't spoken the
right magic words to it. After that, I haven't needed Windows since.

When you are using anything that isn't a plain-vanilla setup, you are far
better off to put something in the middle to talk to their network. In my
case, it has always been a not terribly expensive router. Our first one

I have a not terribly expensive router. That's exactly why I bought it.
I figure if I tell them I'm running Linux, they backpedal, but if I tell
them I have my OS set up to talk to my Cheapass Ultrasuck 2000 XL router
using DHCP, then they gloss over the user config side of it and focus in on
the real issues.

I don't even have any other computers hooked to it, and I'm not using its
crappy firewall, so it's pretty pointless except as insurance against being
told I'm running an unsupported operating system.

My cynical experience says that you do NOT want the provider to label you
as 'one of those LINUX guys'.

No, you don't, although my experience with my current provider has been that
once I manage to get through the layers of drones whose job it is to weed
out the imbeciles, most of the real techs upstream are running Linux at
home.

--
Michael McIntyre ---- Silvan
Linux fanatic, and certified Geek; registered Linux user #243621
http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Rue/5407/
http://rosegarden.sourceforge.net/tutorial/