A Day Late

I wrote a nice long rant yesterday about Qwest DSL with MSN as the ISP, but I wasn’t paying attention and closed the web browser before I posted it (hate it when I do that!). Anyway…my temper has cooled a little since then which is probably a good thing. Maybe I should make it a rule that I can’t rant about something until it’s been at least a day since it happened.

Anyway…what happened was one of my brothers built a new house and had it wired with Cat-5 cable. He asked me to come over and setup his network and such. He already signed up with Qwest DSL with MSN as the ISP and they had shipped him an Arescom Net DSL modem. I setup the network, connected a wireless access point, etc, then connected the DSL Modem to the hub. At first the DSL modem wouldn’t connect up through Qwest so I spent a few hours on the phone with MSN tech support (most of the time on hold) and they finally decided to send a Qwest tech out to check the lines. Turns out they had configured something wrong on the line when they hooked it up, so that was fixed and I got an internet connection. I checked his laptop and it successfully got a DHCP address from the DSL modem and connected up to the internet fine.

I figured that was it, but my brother called a few days ago and said he tried hooking up a second computer to the network and couldn’t get it to work. I was trying to think of a cause when I remembered something strange I noticed when I was on the phone with tech support the week before. The subnet mask on the modem was set to 255.255.255.252. I remember at the time thinking that was very restrictive (my binary skills are rusty so I didn’t realize HOW restrictive until I thought about it some more). That’s right…the DHCP on the modem will only give out 1 IP address. I meant to check on it the week before but got distracted and forgot about it. I did some searching online and came across these two links: link1 link2. Yeah…so I guess this NETWORK modem they sent only works with 1 computer. How dumb is that? I told him to call MSN and cancel his service and call Qwest and have them change his ISP to XMission (who is an AWESOME ISP, by the way). So he called MSN and they said they’d credit his account for 4 months of service if he wanted to purchase a router to connect the multiple machines up to the modem. I have to admit, that’s a pretty good offer (this is what tempered my rant). The router I bought was cheaper than 4 months of service would have been, so that’s what we did. Everythings working just great now. I still think the network modem they sent is dumb, but oh well. One of these days I’ll have to write another rant about Qwest. It’d would be a long one though, so I’ll save it for another day.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 8th, 2003 at 2:58 pm and is filed under General, Windows/Microsoft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.