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So here I sit waiting for my phoneline to get
hooked up, with the promise of ADSL in the week ahead. Might as well
write a tutorial in the meantime. This one will be about what little
I know about the
@Home cable service. Since Cable is not
capped in my area I have no experience with uncapping it, so I can't
help you there. Where to start.
Cable for Newbies
Unrestricted cable offers a bandwidth of 125K/sec
upload, and at least 1.5 Mb/sec download. I never did find out its
max download speed. You also get a relatively set IP address (semi
dynamic). To check your IP in Win9x simply go to the start menu,
click "run" and type "winipcfg" (no quotations). Use the pulldown
bar to switch from the PPP adapter to your Ethernet card that the
cable people installed in your computer (probably 3Com). Click on
more info if you like. It tells you your IP address, which will
start with 24.xx.xxx.xxx. This number is retained for long periods
of time. Note the date that it lists your lease on this IP. It gives
you a lease date and a lease expiry date. If your IP does change,
its gonna happen when your computer is off and the lease expiry date
goes by, but usually the lease expiry date has no effect on your IP.
You can either use this IP to advertise your ftp if you have one set
up, or if you like do a DNS on this number using netlab or some such
and find out your computer's name and give that out to people. But
your best bet is to follow the instructions below. But remember this
IP is basically married to your netcard.
Having a stable IP is good and bad. Its good because
you can give this IP to people who have firewalls or restrictions on
their ftp servers and only allow certain IP's to log in. It's bad
because it makes it much easier for people to tell who's been
bugging them. It also reads like a target to some hackers, who hang
out in IRC waiting for unsuspecting cable users to login so they can
send nasty Trojans and exploit you bandwidth. (I once got a few
hundred emails asking me to unsubscribe people from my porn mailing
list. Sheesh! At 125K upstream you sure can send a lot of emails
fast, and if the Trojan script kiddy does it right, the poor cable
user never even knows his computer is doing it.)
Solution?
Get a firewall!! Anything to make it a little harder to be hacked.
Personally, I like to keep everything I need saved on floppies or
CD's. If I even suspect I've been hacked I format immediately. (And
NEVER save your ICQ dB in the case of a hack... that might be how
they did it. Instead export your ICQ personal address book to a
floppy instead. Yeah you have to reauthorize, but you at least
you'll be sure you're clean.)
As for the installation disk they give you, throw it
out. That @home browser crap they install slows everything down. The
drivers they supply for the netcards are old. Even if you like the
@home browser, at least turn off the browser proxy they give you. To
do that, check the tutorial on proxies. Should be near the top. It
is very slow and confuses the browsers when using keywords in the
address bar. Find out what your netcard is by checking at the back
of the booklet they give you. Go to the manufacturer's website and
download the latest netcard drivers and put them on floppies. It
should only take one floppy to fit a netcard driver, unless you get
sucked into downloading that NIC utility disk as well. You have no
need of that. All you need to get the full glory of cable is any
computer, from a 486 25Mhz or up, and any Ethernet card with proper
drivers. You don't need Windows, or a CD-ROM, or lots of ram, or
Pentium class or anything else. Just a MB, chip (any chip), HD and a
netcard. The reason they want you to have better equipment is
because people with 486's used to call for service support too
often, so they upped the requirements. You don't need the @home
browser to activate things like email or webspace either. It's all
available through their website, although the links to the places
are a little tricky. Setup your email in your browser the same way
you would with any new ISP account. All the proper info is at the
back of the pamphlet they give you. I don't even let the guy touch
my computer anymore. I just tell him to set up the cable line, give
me the netcard and go away. They always get antsy about it, but a
few kicks in the butt, (actually I usually give the addy to this
website to them) gets them out the door. Like I want some @home
cable guy screwing with ANY of my computers. I don't even let my old
roommate pawnmaster do that. The only people allowed to touch any of
my computers are the ones who hack their way in, and the minute I
detect them. Fdisk, format and reinstall, baby. If I suspect it was
one of those three letter people, (like IAD or BSC or whatever, I'll
even go so far as to low level format. ooohhh.. gives me a couple
hours to catch up on reading Maximum PC).
Get a new netcard
for every time you get a new account or move. Tell them you
lost/broke the old one or it's still packed away somewhere or got
lost in the move. If they gave you a PCI one last time, get an ISA
one this time (for using in a 486 as a cable signal server to set up
a home network). They get the best netcards and are actually worth a
fair amount and they always have a few hanging around in the truck.
Most cable installers hand them out like candy.
Other special notes about cable is that if you use
IRC, you either have to use a proxy and a server that allows
proxies, (see tutorial on IRC) or you have to use the network's
dedicated cable server. For Dalnet, I think it's irc.home.net. The
problem with that being
1) everyone knows you're on cable when you
login, making you a hacker target.
2) the @home IRC
servers suffer netsplits from the rest of the network CONSTANTLY..
It can get quite aggravating.
Websites you frequent will get to know who you are. No
longer are you USER10051@sprint.com. Now they can trace back to
exactly your account on the @home network. Once again, use a proxy
for your browser, but NOT the @home proxy. Use one of the ones you
get following the instructions on the proxy tutorial for http
proxies.
Webhosting
Sure, host a site from home. Only if you set up
a home network behind the cable line and dedicate on of the
computers to JUST webhosting. It can support a UBB with about max
200-300 members before it starts crapping out. It can support any
home start up business, providing you aren't starting with a BANG.
Remember to get a dynamic address as described below though.
FTPing
Here's where the fun is. Start downloading 8 files at
a time. Watch the speed. Whizzz. Fill your HD in less than a day. Go
buy a burner to make use of it all. Uploading. What? Only 20 K/s
upload to the site? Screw that! Start multiple sessions. As I said,
the cumulative total upload speed for unrestricted cable should be
around 120K/s. I have heard its around 20-40K/sec for capped cable.
This means about 1 1/2 Hrs to upload a full CD of compressed
data.
Their webspace is usually about 5 or 10 MB's that they
will host for you. It is not .com-able. It is checked regularly for
content. Don't bother arguing with them. They have strict rules and
conditions. I have used it before as an image host, but it's way too
slow. Better off to get a free space somewhere else.
Email
Be very, very careful of attachments. They allow up to
5 MB of email at any given time. DON'T set your browser to check for
email every X minutes. For some reason it's been seizing a lot of
computers lately because the email server often goes down, due to
its incredible bizzyness. Check it manually every now and then. Its
actually a very fast email server and can be checked even if you
aren't using the @home network (i.e.: checking your @home email
account from work or even with hotmail will work, if the settings
are correct and the mail fits within hotmail criteria (2mb or
less))
Problems
They are working on the @home network constantly. They
are pretty good about giving you warnings about interruption in
service. Here's how to diagnose problems with Cable.
1) look at the modem lights. Are they blinking?
If they blink at a repetitive flash, i.e.: flash...flash...flash...
or are flashing red, then the problem is the @home network. Unplug
your cable modem, turn off your computer and wait ten minutes. Plug
the modem back in, turn your computer back on and see if the
flashing stops. No go? Call tech support and find out what the
@#&*$ is going on.
Red blinking means the network is dead
dead. Check you cable attachment to the modem. Green flashing means
the modem is attached to the network, but can't find anything. Often
unplugging you cable modem (both power and cable) when the computer
is off and plugging it in again later takes care of this. This is
not the kind of occasional blink flash blink blink flash you get
when you are watching the lights when you ARE attached. In that case
the ONLINE green light stays on and the send/receive lights are the
ones blinking.
2) the online light is on, but you aren't going
anywhere. The problem is within your computer. This may mean you
need a reboot, or to remove all your network items in the network
control panel and reboot and reinstall them, or at worst reinstall
windows, or even format because you got hacked.
Try this. Try splicing the TV signal off your cable
modem line. Does it work? It used to in my area, until I told
everyone in the city about it and they fixed the problem. Now we
only get 13 channels off the @home cable. Nevertheless, I have NEVER
paid double (TV and @Home) for both services. $80/month. Sheesh!
Pretty soon all TV will broadcast over the Internet anyway.
Dealing with @HOME IAD (Internet Abuse
Division)
@Home regularly scans their own customers looking for
anonymous ftps on port 21. So if you do set up an ftp, try and use a
higher port. like anything over 10000. If they find an anonymous FTP
port 21 and it has warez or porn or even mp3's they will probably
download some for "evidence" and delete the rest and email you from
their IAD department. Noone there admits that they have deleters,
but I know of two who legally scan their own network, and are
applying for the same position right now, heh heh. They also keep
records of bandwidth usage. They told me not to run a radio station
(shoutcast) 24/7. The way it was explained to me though was to break
into the bandwidth slowly. Try to keep it under 10 gigs the first
month and work your way up slowly, capping at about 70gigs/month.
The company will get used to you, and may actually cap you at
certain times, but 70 gigs for 40 Bucks a month isn't bad. If you
ever get called about your usage tell them anything; you're running
a quake server, you're running shoutcast, you're developing a video
game with some friends and you are exchanging the movie clips, you
are broadcasting live porn to your T1 server which relays it out to
your customers (be careful with that one, it implies you are a
business, which costs more and is capped), or that you don't know
anything about bandwidth, but your computer sure got slow ever since
you installed napster. Anything but warez. Just remember, the
Internet abuse division of @home is pretty on the ball about phoning
people for complaints. At the same time a few people who don't have
cable have realized this, and now try and get you in crap with the
IAD (internet abuse division) for their own purposes, so IAD is
getting more lenient and is giving the customer the benefit of the
doubt if their story is good enough. Admit nothing.
If they call you about uploading to places you
shouldn't be or doing anything that can be considered a DOS (denial
of service) attack, the best story is to say that you run multiple
machines in the house. Since @home wants an extra $20/month for
every additional IP you use, you network all the machines through
one using a wingate. This implies that someone else could have
logged into your wingate and used your bandwidth and IP to upload to
the server using their own files. @Home will tell you to start
logging all wingate activity and enable password security on your
wingate. Thank them for their patience. It is also good practice to
keep the subseven Trojan handy. If you get a call from @home IAD
then infect yourself, run the Cleaner and get a screenshot of the
cleaner having found the Trojan. Do this by hitting the "print
screen" button when the cleaner is showing the scan results, then
open MSpaint and paste. Send the screenshot in an email to IAD and
they will believe you. Don't use all the excuses at once. Use a lame
one first time like. "I don't know what my roommate was doing on the
computer, but he moved out today anyway. What is it he's supposedly
done?" You get three strikes, but I have managed to extend it to six
or seven before using the right sequence of excuses. It got to the
point where IAD and I were known to each other (it was my roommate's
account. I never DID get him booted, and they used to call me "the
roommate". "Hello? This is **** communications Internet abuse
division. Is 'the roommate' there?" heh heh. It was for everything
from scanning, to uploading, to ping bombing (still one of my
favorite, to make a phoneliner have to disconnect. 125K/sec no delay
pings, seize any 56K right up, heh heh. They call it 56K, but we all
know the fastest they can respond to pings is at a blazing 4.2K
upstream speed. :p) Basically anything that could be called DOS
(denial of service). Hell, I even once actually hacked the security
on an ftp (don't bother, its not worth it) and forgot to use the
proxy in the ftp client. DOH!! I should have been booted for that
one. I had to use the Subseven Trojan excuse. Phew. I even turned it
on them and started bitching about how ever since I got cable it's
been one attack or another on my machine, so now I have to remember
to unplug the cable when I go out and have to switch to phoneline to
use IRC. Blah, blah, blah,.. And can I please have a new IP, and why
is @home security so terrible? Well they didn't give me the new IP,
but they did leave me alone, no warnings.
Typically you get 3 strikes with @home. First one is a
slap on the wrist warning. Second one is a one-week suspension (they
credit the bill for the week off). Third time they get mad.
Don't
scan much unless you do it through a proxy. I went through 5 days
straight before they said anything. I started at 1.0.0.0 and only
got as far as 79.0.0.0 or something like that. They mostly got mad
at me for scanning the 24.0.0.0's. Duh.. Scanning my own ISP. Talk
about a Darwin Awards candidate.
Changing Your IP
Ok now say you did something to piss someone off and
they know your IP. Since you are on cable, you're sunk right? If
they are motivated, you'll never get a break, right? Wrong! Cable
IP's DO change. Rarely, but they DO. There are a few ways you can do
it yourself. Don't bother phoning @home. They can do it under
certain special circumstances, but they almost never do.
1) Go to the start menu, click run and type in
winipcfg. Change the pulldown bar to your Ethernet card and click
"more info" and then click "Release all". Now turn off you computer
and unplug your cable modem for a few days.
What happens is that
your IP is married to you Ethernet card. When you click "release
all" your leased IP gets thrown back into the pool of IP's and, if
you are lucky, someone else who is either new to @home, or has a new
computer, will end up with your number. It's best to do this on
weekdays when lots of new people get signed up. When you finally do
get back online you will have a new IP, hopefully. The odds of this
working depend on the amount of time your computer is off and the
number of new accounts signed up in your "node".
2) Do the same as above, but while you are
offline, change your Ethernet card. You don't HAVE to use a 3Com.
any decent standard NIC card will do. This has worked for me before,
but only when I remembered to "release all" first. You don't have to
be offline for 5 days or whatever, just make sure your cable modem
is unplugged for the hour or so while you install and configure the
new Ethernet card.
3) This never failed to work for me. I thought
it up while testing some computers I was fixing and noticed that the
IP's on each one were different. Ok take the Ethernet lead from your
cable modem, plug it into the infeed of any Ethernet hub. Connect
TWO computers to the hub. Fire them both up. Your main computer
retains the old IP. The new computer (in my case an old 486 with a
used NIC compatible Ethernet card) has a brand new number. If you
leave them like this for a week, @home will bill you for the second
IP. Turn everything off, switch the Ethernet card in the computers
and when you fire up your main computer again (switching drivers of
course) BANGO! New IP. Sure it's a hassle, but its a lot easier that
what @home has to do to get you a new IP. They have to kill your old
account and sign you up to a brand new one while making paperwork of
what they are doing and why... It's also a hell of a lot better than
turning you computer off for days on end in the HOPES of changing
your IP.
I have no doubt there are better methods. One method I
always wanted to try but never got around to was to flash my
netcard's firmware. See if I could change its name, or if changing
its default resources would help. If anyone (especially you @home
employees) can add to this, please do. Post in the discussion board,
or email Jefe or
I a follow up tutorial.
Dynamic IP's
If you change your IP then how is everyone gonna find
your serv-u? I get update letters from friends all the time whose
addys have changed. Well you shouldn't have advertised your IP in
the first place. Dynip.com will give you any addy you wish, e.g.
www.BiZftp.dynip.com which will remain constant no matter whether
your cable number changes or not. It works for phoneliners too. But
it is only a 30-Day free trial, and I don't trust the crack for it
as it communicates with the head office everytime. Best to pay the
$25 yearly fee. Or better yet, go get one of those
www.BiZftp.dyn.ml.org addys from. They are free and also give you a
constant addy. Again, these are a MUST for anyone trying to make a
phoneline ftp server. @Home currently does not support '.com'
hosting on their webspace or on your home computer.
Now to get Jefe to write a tutorial on ADSL since I'm
the newbie now... heh heh
Here's some essential cablemodem links people have
sent me and ones I've come across on my own, including one on how to
set up a decent home network using up only one IP and avoiding the
extra charges for additional IP usage.
http://www.speedconnect.com/
http://navasgrp.home.att.net/tech/
http://www.speedguide.net/
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