[lug] attbi @Home blues

Sat Dec 22 16:36:47 MST 2001

What a bunch of hassles!  See below for my long and winding road to
success.

On Thu, Dec 20, 2001 at 10:48:07AM -0700, Sean LeBlanc wrote:
> On 12-18 23:27, Rick Casey wrote:
> > Thanks for this info on dhcpcd. Has sure helped.I think I do need to use
> > it instead of pump. I found a good info source about it at
> > www.scrounge.org/linux/dhcpcd.html
> > 
> > Unfortunately I'm getting 'operation failed' when I try to run dhcpcd;
> > my syslog message about it says:
> > 
> >     Dec 18 22:40:19 C28665-A dhcpcd[1911]: timed out waiting for a valid
> > DHCP server response

Resetting my cable modem has fixed this each time.  But this is just
the first step - see below.

> > That looks like my old hostname address from the Excite at Home service.
> > Cannot see where this is coming from; I cleared out the config info
> > using control-panel and rebooted.
> > 
> > How does one clear out this hostname?

Checking the /etc/hosts file and reading `man hostname` might help.

I am back on-line, and here is what I did.

The initial attbi network configuration, as viewed by the client, is
really peculiar and non-standard, using firewalls or the like to
prevent the client from seeing hardly anything.  My "test" method for
a long time was to get an IP via `dhcpcd eth0` and then ping the
gateway machine from /etc/dhcpc/dhcpcd-eth0.info:
  GATEWAY=12.253.84.1
  BROADCAST=255.255.255.255

It never responded which made me assume anything else was hopeless,
and the notion of using a fully-wide-open broadcast address also seems
bizarre (doesn't that mean that all broadcasts are picked up by all
devices on the ethernet segment, even if they aren't on the same
logical IP network?)

So I called a ticket in (waiting between 30 and 60 minutes for either
the initial tech, or the "advanced tech support" or both).

1st problem at their end: my cable modem was no longer registered in
their system.  Before the tech discovered that, voices in the
background were saying "just tell him we don't support linux" or
something like that, I think.  Thankfully, my tech persevered.

So it took them a day or two to fix that, and I still couldn't ping
the gateway so I called back again and they sent out a tech to do the
"provisioning".  He encouraged me to try my browser, and to my great
surprise, I got a response from the browser, again even though I
couldn't ping the DNS machines that dhcpcd had put in my
/etc/resolv.conf file.  It hadn't even occurred to me to try the
"host" command to do a DNS query when I couldn't ping my gateway or
DNS servers....

The browser (netscape) response was coming from
https://sas.r4.attbi.com/
and it asked for an account number and registration code (last 9
digits of the account number).  I got that from the
friendly service guy (who was pretty curious about linux).

The first one he gave me didn't work, so he phoned in and
they were able to give him a new one right away (normally
takes 72 hours, he said....)

After filling out the registration page it
redirected the browser to something under this server:
  https://registration.attbi.com/

But the redirection was failing and I couldn't to the
server or anything.

This next hurdle was only overcome by temporarily configuring a proxy
in Netscape:

  https and http proxy: sas.r4.attbi.com port 8000
  no-proxy-on: r4.attbi.com

After going thru more forms, I got registered.  But I still couldn't
surf beyond the registration pages - the system kept intercepting
all port 80 requests and sending them there.

After we both scratched our heads for a while and he kept asking
me to reboot linux (thus losing lots of other context I was
in the middle of), I decided to once again reset the cable
modem (there is a reset pin in my RCA modem, so no need to
physically unplug it....)

That made everything finally work fine from that machine.
Now I can also ping the gateway, dns, etc.

I had to go to the home page and sign up from there for a second
machine before my second machine could get a dhcpcd response.

I still see lousy and eratic ping times, like I did from the
@home network.  E.g., the closest ntp server to me has ping
stats like this, with a pretty high standard deviation:

 15 packets transmitted, 15 packets received, 0% packet loss
 round-trip min/avg/max/mdev = 38.556/66.274/108.582/25.916 ms

[I found the closest servers via this command]

  lynx -source http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/ntp/clock2.htm |
	sed -n -e 's,).*,,' -e' /([0-9.]*$/s/.*(//p' |
	xargs ntpdate -q |
	sort -n +7 > /tmp/ntp-close

Hope this helps someone.  Good luck,

Neal McBurnett <neal at bcn.boulder.co.us>
http://bcn.boulder.co.us/~neal/
GPG/PGP signed and/or sealed mail encouraged.  Keyid: 2C9EBA60

> > Don't I a need at least a DHCP server IP to direct dhcpcd where to go?
> 
> No, you don't need a DHCP server IP. That's the whole point - if DHCP server
> needs to be moved, clients won't miss a beat. It uses broadcast to find it.
> 
> It doesn't work in Windoze, either, right? What lights are on your cable
> modem? I talked to a guy from CLUE who had similar problem (DHCP timing out)
> and he ended up exchanging his modem for another. There was no traffic
> lights before trying DHCP, but he could see them light up when he tried DHCP.
> 
> When you called them before, could they see your modem? 
> 
> It sounds to me like you might want to look outside your own software config
> info if it doesn't work in Windoze, either. Pump worked easy as pie for me,
> and it or dhcpcd should for you, too. I have a sneaking suspicion that it is
> something else that's going to require a call to your favorite service
> personnel. :/
> 
> -- 
> Sean LeBlanc:seanleblanc at attbi.com Yahoo:seanleblancathome 
> ICQ:138565743 MSN:seanleblancathome AIM:sleblancathome 
> Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks 
> and discomforts. 
> -Arnold Bennett, "The Arnold Bennett Calendar" 
> Management QOTD:This seems correct, however, correctness doesn't pay the bills.
> We need to table this and eliminate redundancies in the
> technology strategy.
> 
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