Doug's Dynamic Drivel

You would expect that an ILEC who has strong competition from the cablecos for residential internet service would go out of their way to ensure that their service is easy to set up. Think again. My cable Internet got really flaky last week just before Christmas. Shaw tech support, the first three times I called, blamed it on my wireless router. There was no problem with the router. The last time I called I actually got to talk to someone who knew WTF they were talking about (I mean how often do you have to tell someone that you know what you’re doing, have already done the tests he’s asking you to repeat and btw I can ping domains but after IP resolution it times out so ergo it’s on your end not my end) and between us we performed enough tests to show that it was one of their cards in the head-end locally that was screwy and he opened a repair ticket on it. Problem solved, 6 hours later the card had been replaced. However for two days I was barely able to get any work done as my connection would not stay up for more than a few minutes at at a time and because of that I decided I would cough up the bucks to get a second connection installed, this one a DSL connection from Telus our local ILEC. So I call them up and they offer me a great deal, a wireless router with an ADSL plan that gives me 7Mbps download and I believe 1.5Mbps upload speed for $25/mo. I sign up and yesterday I get their modem with an install disk delivered. Great – should be a piece of cake. Sigh. First sign of something wrong? Their frikken install disk gets 98% of the way through the configuration when it stalls – right at the point it says copy down these important network settings but before it can actually put those settings on the screen for you to copy down. Great now I have no way to get into the router to discover those settings because I’m missing the critical information

1. what IP is used to access the router and
2. what is the user name
3. what is the password

So I pick up the phone and call Telus tech support

and that ain’t much of an exaggeration I’m sorry to say. At least the person I spoke to last night was able to give me the IP address to connect to the router via CAT5 with and the default username and password. After that he was useless as was the guy I got tonight (although he was a bit better). Finally after having the router reject password after password for encryption I turned security off and was able to connect right away – Telus tech support guy says hold on for a minute while I go talk to someone else about this particular modem – OK – 2 minutes later the line drops off (an hour or so later and he hasn’t called me back) and I decide to have another go at it myself.

First thing I did was uninstall the frikken useless wireless connection software those idiots installed on my computer. Next I turned encryption back on and set up a new connection – worked right away. It sure looks to me like it was their useless software that was causing all the trouble.

Getting it working in Ubuntu was a breeze once I installed a new network manager – Wicd – awesome manager. Now all I have to do is figure out how get it working on Diane’s iMac and teach her how to switch between connections

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