Cable modem tricks

I recently moved (back) to a cable modem, after being, pretty happily, with Speakeasy DSL. I had used cable modems since they first came out, but moved to DSL because of the much faster upload speeds. As I work for a video conferencing software company (inSORS), upload speeds are as important as download ones. And I could get a 1mb SDSL (synchronous DSL, so upload & download speeds were the same), I made the switch.

However, the cost was pretty steep (US$200 per month), even if my company was paying for it. Now that cable modems are up to 768kpbs upload speeds (and 6mb down!), for about $50 a month, the switch was pretty much a no brainer. I've always told folks that asked that cable is, in general, a much more economically feasible broadband alternative than DSL. For the same speeds, DSL is generally twice as much. Plus you have to deal with two or three different folks (Speakeasy was my provider, Covad did the work and it was actually Verizons "copper" wire in the end).

But I miss Speakeasy. I got some cool perks (free download service, game server time, etc), as well as 4 static IP addresses. For reasons unknown to me and even to folks who know a million times more than me, cable companies have always gone with a dynamic IP address. While it almost never seems to change, they are free to give you a different IP address at any time. So running servers and the like is a little more difficult. You can go with a dynamic dhs host (I used to use TZO), it's still much more of a pain. Speakeasy was very server friendly. Instead, I relocated my servers to my friend's ISP (MV.COM if you're interested), and solved all kinds of problems that way!

Anyway, here's a cool page with lots of cable modem tips. I recently found out that the IP address 192.168.100.1 connects to my cable modem and shows some basic info about it. That's easy and this page shows even more stuff like that.

Cable Modem Troubleshooting Tips: IP addresses

Practice Healthy Computing

I've been looking for something to keep a more active watch on my server, which is now kept remotely. Here's one possiblity. I need to find out if the motherboard has any of the supported chips, though.

Port description for sysutils/healthd

Script for setting up internet sharing

Here's a script that will help set up your machine by asking questions about your internet sharing and firewalling. Looks pretty cool:


IPFilter "automagic' script for FreeBSD / Roq.com

More on upgrading perl

Here's a page with more info on the perl upgrade script that I mentioned earlier:

Upgrading Perl On FreeBSD - freebsd.munk.nu

Playing A Little Night Music

If you want to play a music cd, you don't need to mount it. But you do need permission to access the device. So, as root, type:

$ chmod 666 /dev/acdo

To make this a more permanent change, add this to /etc/devfs.conf:

perm acd0 0666

so it will set the correct permissions at boot.

Reinstall boot manager

Say FreeBSD forgets that you have Windows (boo hiss) installed on hard drive, and yet you want to continue to dual boot. Here's some easy steps to either get BootMgr running again, or to start it running for the first time:

1) Do as root "sysctl kern.geom.debugflags=16"
2) Start sysinstall
3) Go Configure->FDISK-> "OK" -> Q
4) It will ask if you wish boot manager
5) Select BootMgr

Install walkthrough

Nice step by step procedeure for installing FreeBSD, with lots of other links:

How To Install FreeBSD OS Primer

Don't fsck me

If you want to tell FreeBSD to not run fsck at boot time on a particular partition (maybe you are sharing it with another OS, or maybe it just isn't worth the trouble), you can set the sixth (last) field in /etc/fstab to be 0 (zero). This field is the order for running fsck, and if it is zero, don't do it at all.

fstab man page

I can hear your heartbeat

Now that my system is stored remotely, I'm looking into some way of keeping track of its status. One way is a "heartbeat", which regularily pings it and sends me a message if there is a problem. Here's one implementation in ports:

Port description for sysutils/heartbeat