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September 17, 2003

ADSL vs Cable

As many of the regular readers know, I have been very annoyed with my regular ISP (and that is one of the reasons for moving to Typepad). Well I have finally had enough and I am in the process of switching to another ISP who provides ADSL instead of the current Cable connection. The ADSL people were very honest and upfront and pointed out that ADSL was not as fast as cable - at least in theory. So I tested it. I picked two mirror sites (both in the US) and downloaded 3 files from each (the 6 files were segments of a single CD). The ADSL connection sustained 53Kb/sec for all three files. The cable modem got one file at 92Kb/sec, one at 65 Kb/sec and one at 41 Kb/sec. According to the ADSL people, cable can theoretically handle 6 times the ADSL (512/128) bandwidth.....

Anyway, the next thing to do was start playing with the network configuration. The current network is based around an airport (snow) basestation which is connected to the cable modem and the main server plus supplying a wireless link to other computers. The wireless links use WEP128 and MAC address encoding to connect and the whole thing works OK. Now the ADSL "modem" is inside a Dlink bridge/router thing and so I have to set up all the magic stuff like port mapping. On the airport this is done via the airport admin tool and it is trivial, on the dlink it is all done through a web page. Grab the book, check out the DHCP - which stops at *.33. Cool, lets map port 22 through to the laptop which I am using for testing. Map 22 inbound - to 22 @ *.1. No worries, test over the cable network. Doesn't work. Permission denied.

Hmmm. Must be a firewall. Check, no firewall. Plug two laptops back to back, ssh works. Plug via ADSL and it doesn't work. Hmmm. Maybe there is some port blocking going on. Nope. Vendor says no port blocking. Try port 80. Create map. Test. Still doesn't work.

[Stop laughing at the back. I know you have spotted my mistake but I hadn't done so at this point in time so just be patient.]

Upgrade the firmware. That was exciting. Try deleting the port rules and recreating them. Can't delete the rules due to some wierd javascript problem. Might be Safari. Try OmniWeb. Nope. Try Camino. Nope. Try Internet Exploder. Works. Morons. Tell Safari to pretent to be Internet Exploder. Works. OK. The idiots have written IE specific code. Note to self: Write rant about morons and send to dlink.

Delete port maps. Recreate. Still doesn't work. It is 1 AM and nothing is working. AAARRRGGGHHH! How can I be a geek if I can't even cofigure a port forward in a router. I will have to hand in my geek badge, turn to the dark side and become a manager. Wait a minute, maybe I should actually read the instructions. After four hours of tearing my hair out, it couldn't hurt.

Read .... read .... read .... DHCP .... address range .... *.2 to *.33 .... Huh? Why does it start at *.2? Because the ADSL router is at *.1 (The airport is configured differently). So I was forwarding port 22 to port 22 on the same device. That won't work. Why didn't I check my IP address? Delete. Recreate. Works. Tired. Sleep.

Posted by Ozguru at September 17, 2003 07:09 AM

Comments

Looks like a page out of some of my mis-adventures. Good to see that I'm not the only one that does things in a round-about fashion.

Posted by: Tony S. at September 17, 2003 07:09 AM

Checking my own post and I have just had a wierd thought. Why *.33 for the last DHCP address? If I can remember my binary, surely *.31 would be smarter? There are of course only 10 types of people - those who can read binary and those who cannot.

Posted by: ozguru at September 17, 2003 07:09 AM

I'm just a neophyte in the blogosphere and most of the technical stuff you rolled off went right over my head. I'm learning, but it's slow going. BTW, listening to the news right now and they just announced that Bill Gates is the World's Richest Man with wealth valued at $46 Billion. What a guy.

Posted by: Interested-Participant at September 17, 2003 07:09 AM