So, today is the big day, when I get to stop tethering on my cell phone and get real internet again. Maybe.
I get home to find a big 70 foot long cable running from the road, across my yard and around to the side of the house. It seems they hooked up my DSL, but didn't have time to bury the cable. They are coming back in eight days to do that...
Having said that, I should have internet! Wait. My welcome package didn't come today like it was supposed to.
As fortune would have it though, I declined being provided a modem and elected to use my own. Jet down the stairs, hook everything up (we'll bypass the complexity caused by the rats nest of cabling in my basement...) and...
I need my PPP username and password. Sigh.
Now, I have to admit, ATT's automated phone service is ingenious. Never before have I had to randomly guess what it actually wanted me to say to get to the right person, after answering truthfully and getting sent in circles for 48 minutes. However, once I actually reached a real live breathing human being, they sorted me out pretty quick, not counting one oddity.
As I have read elsewhere, they really, really didn't want to support my modem. I didn't even ask them to, I literally said I needed my username and password, that's it. I eventually even agreed to use the Motorola 2210 I had laying around from the *last* time I had DSL with them at our old house. Humorously, they use a class C internal address range coming out of their modems. So it wanted to use 192.168.1.1 as the external IP for my network. Kind of an issue, since I use that range for my internal network, and I reallyu wasn't interested in changing my DHCP server's scope, reassigning all of the reservations and rebooting a gajillion machines, and the wireless access point... Not to mention I would have lost connectivity to the server that the DSL modem was plugged in to and I really didn't want to have to walk back in there to log into it locally.
Oddly, this seems like it is what it is for DSL, as the other DSL modem I purchased is actually using 192.168.0.1 as the external IP for my network, which seems even *more* drama filled, as most routers default to that range.
Long story short: Much drama, but I have internet again!