This is a long message telling of my Internet adventures over the last few days.
It all started early last week when one of the droids from Insight called to say they planned to install a new cable modem in our house to support the changes being made to our telephone service. We buy the Insight triple play—cable, broadband and telephone—and the new modem would support the latter two, giving our phone service more features. The conversation went something like this: Me: I have a pretty good modem already that works well with my home network. Droid: The modem we plan to install is also a fine modem. Me: Is it possible for me to continue using my modem for the broadband and use yours for the telephone. Droid: I'll be sure to send a installer a note telling him you want to do that. Me: You're sure? The last modem I got from you guys was a piece of shit. Droid: Of course! We do this all the time. He'll be there between 1:00 and 3:00 on Tuesday. My house network is a little more complicated than usual. A corner of the basement is my version of a wiring closet. Over the years, a dozen or so Ethernet wires have been pulled to just about every room of the house and they all start at a patch panel in the wiring corner. The corner has a fifteen port switch, Linux server, NAS drive, UPS and the cable modem. The topology is a little more complicated because my Airport Extreme router sits on the first floor, in a more central location to give strong WiFi. So, the Insight cable comes into the basement modem and the Ethernet side of the modem runs up to the Airport one floor above. Then the Ethernet output of the Airport runs back down the basement to the switch. The Airport serves WiFi as well as being the firewall and the DHCP server. As you can see, the modem is nothing more than a bridge between Insight's network and my LAN. I want it to do nothing but pass TCP packets back and forth. Tuesday rolled around and I came home early so I'd be there when the installer arrived. He pulled into the driveway at 1:00 sharp, and I ushered him down to the wiring corner. The first thing he said was "WiFi won't work very good from down here." I told him about the Airport upstairs and how the system was set up. "They told me I could keep using my original modem," I said. "Who told you that?" he asked. "The guy on the phone who set up the appointment," I replied. "The guy was wrong," he said. "We never do that." He said "This modem has WiFi and a router built in, you know." I told him that nobody had told me, but I'd just as soon turn both of them off. "Don't know if you can," he said. I asked "Why not?" He said "Well, the modem doesn't have a manual or anything with it. I've never tried, but I've heard you can get the manual off the Internet." He unplugged my modem, plugged his in, made sure the phone was working, got the right lights to start blinking and tested the modem's output by plugging my laptop into it. "You're good to go here. The modem's working fine," he said. Full of hubris, I said that I could probably get it to work with my system. I signed the papers and let him go on to his next victim. The modem is an impressive looking box with lots of lights and a four-port Ethernet switch on the back. It's an Arris TM826G set up especially for Time/Warner. It has a router, a firewall and WiFi built in. The LAN wasn't working, but my laptop was still plugged into the modem and I used it to find the manuals. Sure enough, the Arris Web site had two manuals. One was the consumer manual for the Complete Idiot® and the second had the instructions to configure the router and WiFi via the Web interface. It looked pretty easy because the router has a setting called "Bridge Mode"—exactly what I wanted. I set it to bridge mode, made up a long and twisty password and plugged it into my LAN. Everything worked! Amazing! Now I wanted to rearrange the boxes in the wiring corner because the new modem is quite a bit larger than the old one. I unplugged the new modem, shifted the boxes and plugged it back in. The modem came up just fine, but none of the devices on the LAN could see the Internet. I logged back into the modem and had a look around. Bridge mode was turned off. I turned it back on and everything worked, On a hunch, I restarted the modem. Bridge mode was turned off. It seems that every time the modem is restarted, it resets a few features back to their defaults. Time/Warner has "tweaked" the modem's firmware to have the following "features" that now work differently than the documentation says they should. Here are the ones I've noticed so far. • Bridge mode resets itself on a power cycle. • The built-in router won't let you set static IP numbers in its DHCP server using the MAC numbers. If you try, it just returns an error. • It seems to insist on using a 192.168.0.x address space instead of the 192.168.100.x that I've been using. • It won't remember non-Insight DNS settings after a power cycle. • It won't handshake properly with DynDNS. • The built in firewall will (sometimes??) forget custom configurations on a power cycle. I talked to an Insight rep on the phone last evening and asked him if there was a list of Time/Warner "features" for the modem. He doesn't know of one. There is an Insight administrative interface for the modem, but it has a secret password that changes every day. (I kid you not.) Insight can get into the modem through this "secret" back door to change some of the settings. The person I talked to on the phone offered to have this done to permanently lobotomize it, so it will run in nothing but bridge mode. I think I'll take him up on the offer. Is this the opening salvo of what can be expected from the Time/Warner takeover of Insight? PS/ The modem does move data just as fast as the previous one. I’m getting 24.3 Mb/s down and 1.44 Mb/s up when connected to the machine in my office.
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