A World of Wires a tale of irritation, aggravation, and annoyance by Mike Sugimoto

(And while I'm here, can I just say how thoroughly amused I am at the number of visitors dropping by because they fed "gigantic asses" into a search engine? Boy, that referer header sure is a lot of fun, eh?)

It's all because of porn.

The way I look at it, most people don't need a really high speed connection to the Internet. What drives them to get it, though, is porn. Really -- if you're using the Web to find information, it's going to be mostly textual, and text moves quickly over a standard phone line. But if you're looking at pictures then chances are you're either a) at photo.net, or b) visiting www.gigantic-asses.com and fulfilling your need for filthy pornography. (A) is legitimate, or at least mostly so, unless you're pretending to be a photographer so you have an excuse to look at naked pictures (hey, Sean). (B) is legitimate if you're single, alone, male, and horny -- which pretty much describes the prototypical guy on the Internet.

So it's probably not surprising that on-line porn took off the way it did. alt.binaries.pictures.erotica was a staple of most people's .newsrc files back when people still knew what a .newsrc file was. Porn remains the only surefire way to make money on (or perhaps more accurately, off of) the Internet, and unless you're stealing your content from other places, it has huge overhead anyway. I'm a little confused as to why, with the huge amount of porn that is available free on Usenet, people continue to pay money for it. There's nothing inherently wrong with pornography. I don't think that its widespread availability on the net is a bad thing. And, contrary to what some people think, I also don't think that a horny 12 year-old kid is going to have any problems defeating the filtering software his parents put on his computer. There's nothing more motivated in the world than a 12 year-old kid in search of porn, except maybe a 15 year-old kid in search of porn. I look at it this way: They're either going to get it off the net, or they're going to get it from a scuzzy guy named Bob in an alley somewhere. They might as well get it from the net and in the safety of their own homes.

And if you look at the evolution of electronic commerce, you'll see that pornography was the driving force between a lot of it. Porn sites needed a safe and secure way to separate horny kids from their money, so we got SSL packet encryption and organizations like CCBill. Porn paved the way for twits like Jeff Bezos to take credit for changing the way we do business and to stand up and proclaim he's an avid reader because he reads 35 books a year. (Yeah, what does that make me? An obsessive compulsive?) Sorry, amazon, you didn't change the way people did business on the net; neither did you, E-Bay. You should really thank Danni Ashe before you thank anyone else. In fact, Jeff, you should get down on your knees and.. uh.. show Ms. Ashe how much you appreciate what she's done. I'd pay to see that. Yeah.

But I digress.

I needed a faster connection because I was downloading.. um.. Linux kernel files. Yeah. See, Linus Torvalds -- despite having once said that anyone who says "Disk space is cheap should be shot" -- keeps putting out these really big kernel source files that are about 70MB unpacked and roughly 13MB when they've been gzipped (it's all source code, so it compresses very well). It's very irritating, in a "hey, why am I suddenly running out of disk space on /usr/src?" kind of way. Disk space isn't cheap, but Linus, you're certainly acting like it is.

I also had a Sun SPARCstation 10 sitting around that I kind of wanted to bring up to operational specs. Sun hardware is pretty good, and the quality of their software is excellent, although Solaris 7 runs like a pig on a sparc10 thanks to bloat and the second system effect. Unfortunately, the people who package Solaris are bloody idiots and don't provide useful tools bundled with the operating system -- tools like, oh, I don't know, emacs. Or a compiler. Or a decent shell. This isn't specifically Sun's fault -- all vendors do this (it's called "vendor-supplied brain-dead idiocy") -- but I rag on Sun mostly because I haven't had to fight with a vanilla install from IBM, SGI, HP, DEC Compaq (surely it's now Unixario as opposed to Tru64), or any other commercial vendor recently.

It's very frustrating trying to bring a system up to a level where it begins to speak and act the way a naive person might assume a Unix workstation would, particularly when you need to download Very Large Files on a Very Regular Basis. So the sparc10 sits unused on a table across from my more heavily used computers. For a while, it was acting as a very big and very expensive X terminal for my Linux machine -- which was, in and of itself, kind of funny.

So I needed a bigger pipe and a faster connection. Since I don't have $2,000 a month sitting in my bank account, this meant I had two choices. I could get one of Telus's ADSL packages, or I could go with Shaw@Home, an IP-over-cable service provided by my local cable monopoly.

People who know me well will scratch their heads, because this placed me in an ethical quandry: I hate both Telus and Shaw. I think they're bloated, unresponsive, and inept companies that like to screw over consumers for the hell of it. I would have been much happier getting ADSL or cable service from someone like Island Net, much as my friend Joey Lindstrom gets ADSL service from his inept ISP, CADVision. Island Net isn't inept, so they could probably have figured out how to crush both Shaw and Telus in pricing strategy for ADSL services, but Island Net also didn't have the capital to co-locate their DSLAMs with Telus's in the central office, so they were out of the ADSL game. There was the possibility that Telus might have to re-sell ADSL wholesale to other ISPs, but that wasn't an option.

I wanted ADSL. I really wanted ADSL. But Telus's Web pages, though somewhat informative, were infuriatingly hard to decipher. And their pricing plan was stupid, too: fundamentally, it doesn't cost them any more to provide the full standard-mandated 7Mbps service than it does for them to provide the 1.5Mbps service they're offering at their lowest cost option. Telus could kick Shaw's ass in the high-speed Internet to home game if they figured that out, but instead they want to gouge you for almost $150/month if you want the full meal deal. I was prepared to accept the 1.5Mbps limitations and go with that for the time being (while crossing my fingers in the hopes they'd get smart and figure out how to price their services intelligently), but I didn't have that choice. I called their 1-888 number and spoke to a thoroughly intelligent and very nice woman named Lisa who explained that, unfortunately, my central office was out of DSLAMs and it would probably be April before they had any more. I wanted to be pissed off, except Lisa had been too nice for me to be pissed off. I turned my attention to Shaw.

This did not make me happy. I really didn't want a $90/month cable bill, since they run everything together. I didn't like the idea of subsidizing an organization that had been historically bad at controlling network abuse from within its own network -- portscanning, spamming (both Usenet and e-mail), DoSing.. it had all come from inside the @Home network at one point or another, and I wasn't looking forward to my becoming a member of their network. Cable modems scare me because they're a broadcast network rather than a point-to-point (as ADSL is), and I have neighbors. My friend Sean has a cable modem and quite a nice setup at his place, and I've plugged in my laptop and gone wandering around on other people's shared hard drives -- not really ethical, but it's not my fault they're running Windows and don't know enough to at least disable file and printer sharing on their systems. (I didn't do anything other than look, so you can stop composing that nasty e-mail.)

ADSL would open up a bunch of security concerns too, but at least those concerns would be coming from people outside my local subnet (ie, script kiddies running netblock-wide portscans). Cable meant I'd have to contend with people within my own subnet -- in other words, my neighbors. Some people, including me after two drinks, might say this is a good thing since I can go pound the snot out of anyone who's trying to break into my box. But much as I'd like to ram an HP workstation keyboard sideways up the ass of anyone stupid enough to try cracking my machines, I'd be simply more inclined to sic the local police department on the offenders.

My main problem with both ADSL and cable is that the bandwidth is asymmetrical. ADSL doesn't even pretend that it isn't; the "asymmetrical" part is built right into the name. Most bandwidth to the home consumer is asymmetrical because the assumption is that you'll be sucking back more than you'll be spewing out. And that's generally true -- most people use the net in a read-only way, and if they put anything back on the net, it'll be through a server that has a faster connection than ADSL or cable. But some of us are Web publishers in our spare time, and that means we have to put large volumes of files on Web sites in short periods of time.. and that means uplink speed is important, too.

What finally did it for me was a conversation I had with my mother. She was looking at getting a CADVision ADSL drop and wanted to know about it. I figured that if my mom -- not the most computer literate person in the world -- had decided she was going to get an ADSL connection, I wasn't going to be left out in the cold motoring along at 56kpbs. Having talked to Telus and being told I had to wait until April left one choice: Call Shaw.

I had attempted to register for the @Home service using their Web site earlier in the week (after Lisa told me I couldn't get ADSL until April), but nothing had come of it -- no confirmation e-mail, no phone call, nothing. So I phoned Shaw in Victoria and was connected to a woman named Gina, who attempted to go through the setup questions but then got stuck when I told her my computer was a "Sparc 10" and that my operating system type was "Solaris." "Is that a Pentium?" she asked.

I knew this was coming, but I wanted to see how they'd cope with it.

"No," I said, "it's not a Pentium. It's not a Macintosh. It's a Sun Sparcstation 10."

"Um, could you hold on a minute? I'm going to transfer you to Dean." Dean was a nice guy, who didn't know what a Sparcstation was either, but told me it didn't matter, that this would be an "unsupported installation." Suited me fine; I didn't want the software, I didn't want the gimmicks, I just wanted the big pipe. I could figure out the rest.

Dean then proceeded to ask me a series of questions that I couldn't figure out. Why did it matter if I had a CD-ROM drive? This was an unsupported install. I had to get my own TCP/IP stack up and running -- hell, I even had to buy my own Ethernet card (oh no). He then transfered me back to Gina who set up an installation date: Thursday, March 2nd. This call was taking place on the 26th of February -- in other words, five days between order date and the hook-up. I was shocked. When I moved to Victoria, I had to wait three and a half weeks to get a cable TV hookup, during which time I developed an intense loathing of broadcast television. My, how things have changed.

Etherbunnies and Firewalls

After getting off the phone with Shaw, I got in the car and drove to the Lesser Hateful Place, a computer store I know gouges me but that I deal with because they're less annoying than other places in town. (In case you were wondering, there is in fact a Hateful Place in town, and no, it's not Fry's.) I spent a good twenty minutes attempting to peer intelligently at the Ethernet cards they had for sale, and eventually, I grabbed the cheapest PCI card available: a 10/100Mbps auto-sensing thing from Linksys. It was only on the way out of the store I noticed that the back of the box said "Runs with virtually all network operating systems including Linux." That made me happy; I was worried I would have to go and look up the LNE100TX in the compatibility lists.

It turns out that the LNE100TX uses the Tulip driver which, like most great things involving Ethernet cards and Linux, was written by Donald Becker, who actually gets paid by NASA to do stuff like this. Installing and configuring the LNE100TX was a breeze, although I had to sacrifice my shitty Diamond Multimedia PCI video card in favor of the even shittier Alliance ProMotion 6422 video card that was built-in to the motherboard. The module compiled without a hitch and, two reboots later (because I forgot to mess around with LILO the first time I did this), my machine had both eth0 and eth1 ports enabled.

Most painless hardware upgrade I've done in a long time.

In between visits to the Scary Devil Monastery to read the coincidental thread about another monk getting cable access over his prefered DSL solution, I tried to build and install a firewall. The big concern for me was protecting my laptop and my Sparcstation from the outside Internet while letting them continue to access the rest of the world. In practice this means IP masquerading and firewalling, and for a 2.2.x Linux kernel, that means IP chaining.

IP chaining is a confusing subject, even for someone like me who thinks he's smart and can tell you about networking Unix boxes together. I eventually got a minimalist firewall and masquerading system up and running, mostly by disabling everything in /etc/inetd.conf and blindly throwing commands into /etc/rc.d/rc.firewall. The only way into my machine was then by http (controlled through the mighty AOLserver) and by sshd, an encrypted version of telnet. Any other connection would be met with a harsh "No. Go away."

Along the way, I brought my kernel up to the last known stable version, nailed most of the doors shut, and generally had a hell of a time trying to get my routing tables to behave now that I had two Ethernet interfaces going at once, particularly since one suffered from the "you can't get there from here" problem -- nothing was attached to it.

While waiting for the cable installer to show up, I launched wave after wave of attack against my machine -- SATAN, SAINT, ISS, BASS, COPS -- looking for vulnerabilities. Came off pretty clean, too, which was something of a relief; I could be denial-of-serviced, but cracking wasn't too likely. Just to be on the safe side, though, I revoked every account not belonging to me. I made sure sshd worked. I bashed my head against the machine over and over again trying to figure out how to compromise it, and eventually decided that things were okay. Not crack proof -- no machine ever is -- but good enough.

Meanwhile, I began thinking about my decision to get a cable connection. Man, I wished things had been different, and that Telus had had equipment at the central office! Of course, I also wished that I had $2,000 a month to blow on this kind of bandwidth, because then I could get what I really wanted.

That would have been a DS-3, or at least part of a DS-3. And I could get a DS-3, too, from Shaw Fiberlink. Hey, wait a minute -- Shaw? Isn't that the evil cable company? Well, yes. But Fiberlink is run by a different bunch than the bozos who run the @Home service and who can't defend their own network. Fiberlink is a hotbed of clued people who are very serious about providing good connectivity to customers who are particularly picky about what they get. Okay, so their news servers suck too (my experiences with CUUG's news server when they were an SFL customer bear me out), but you should be doing your own peering anyway and not pulling down articles off your upstream bandwidth provider. But Island Net gets some of their connectivity through Fiberlink, and Mark generally doesn't associate with riffraf on the upstream side of things.

A DS-3 was sort of overkill, anyway. DS-1 might be more appropriate. And while I was looking at the Fiberlink pages, there was something that hit me: The people who are selling high speed connections to home consumers don't actually tell you anything outside of marketing propaganda. I mean, think about it -- @Home says, "500 times faster than an ordinary phone line." Well, what does that mean, and by what standard? Is it a 14.4k, 28.8k, 33.6k, or 56k connection? No one would tell me. It was very frustrating, rather like trying to extract technical details from Microsoft.

I think this is symptomatic of a larger problem, specifically that companies that provide complicated services to consumers automatically assume the consumer is an idiot. It's not an incorrect assumption some of the time, because -- let's face it -- the average consumer's bullshit detector is totally broken when it comes to computers and networking. Hell, it's totally broken when it comes to most aspects of technology. I'm not claiming superiority here either; I'm totally clueless in a lot of things.

The assumption that consumers are clueless is a big mistake, in my opinion; it reflects badly on the companies who provide services to those supposedly stupid consumers. If I call Shaw up and ask about their @Home peering agreements and routing tables, I should be able to get an answer. Presumably, there is a way to get this kind of information from them, but I haven't figured out what it is yet.

For 99% of the consumers out there, Shaw's assumption that they're clueless won't matter. 99% of the people who call them for service won't ask or care about peering, routing, network security, or upstream equipment, so Shaw can get away with putting clueless droids on the phones to say things like, "It's 500 times faster," and nobody will know the difference. But for that 1% of consumers who do know more and have to deal with Shaw, their inability to provide answers to (contextually) basic technical questions is a liability, not an asset. It's very frustrating. Fiberlink, by contrast, knows that the people buying their services aren't stupid, so they can't afford to have confusing and/or misleading documents on their Web sites, and the people you talk to on the phone are less likely to be stupid and/or clueless. The same goes for other Tier 1 providers; while the average tech at Sprint or Ameritech may be frustratingly dumb (and whenever I'm trying to debug a line, they almost always are shockingly stupid), they're nowhere near as bad as the consumer-level guys in the local phone and cable companies.

It's unrealistic to expect companies like Telus and Shaw to train their first-tier support technicians in the fine art of internetworking, but it would be very nice to know that there's a level of support beyond that first-tier -- that there's light beyond the idiot filter, as it were. I've dealt with Tier 1 providers before (I had great fun with an Ameritech DS-3 with frame relay once upon a time), and while you may have to fight a bit to get the person who really does know what's going on, you can eventually get someone who has a clue and thus solve your problem. I don't get that feeling with Shaw; friends who have spent time trying to solve problems with Shaw have reported a general lack of knowledge on their part.

My concerns about their technical abilities were not encouraged by some alarming e-mail from my friend Rob the day before the installer was due:

SHAW has, today, accused me of "unacceptable use", in that they claim
probes are originating from my system, and are being sensed by at least
two people's systems, out there somewhere.  They say it's on port 109,
normally used for POP2. I'm sure there's a simple explanation, however
I'd like to know how this occurred, when I wasn't home. If someone's
using my box to their own devices, I'll have to inflict serious harm. 

SHAW is pissing me off.  Knowing them, it's likely their own servers.
Did I mention the time they assigned the same modem serial number to
someone else?  It made for interesting connections, since the damn
routers thought we were the same person. Then the management with an
attitude intervenes on the phone, while I'm calmly growling at the
reps, and tries to ask me what the problems were.  I explain again to
moron #6 what's been happening, and she offers a discount.  I'm not
feeling at all consoled and thinking they completely forgot what I'd
told them, within 5 seconds of hanging up... again.  The concept of
improving customer service was rapidly replaced with the deep thought
process of whether or not she'll make it to her hair appointment,
before her date with the boss. 

Does hair dye permeate the follicles and the meninges and otherwise
affect higher brain functions?

Rob

I went to bed worried about the next day.

The Installation

"Xpqtjs. Mkay. Thanks."

"Have a nice day." Click. I took the whole day off for this?

True to their word, they showed up a little after one. A dude from Shaw came by, looking remarkably like one of my friends, located the closest cable outlet, and proceeded to crimp connectors to various bits of coaxial cable, install splitters, and run more coaxial cable over to my cluster of computers. He eyed my Sparcstation somewhat curiously, so I told him about its history and how, ten years ago, it probably would have cost more than the van he drove over in. He unboxed my Terayon cable modem, handed me some pieces of wire, and said, "This is an unsupported install, but you knew that already. So do your voodoo thing, and we'll be all set." The power converter found an outlet; the 10-BaseT found its way to my Ethernet card.. this was it. 'ifconfig eth0 up,' I said, followed by 'dhcpcd eth0 /etc/rc.d/rc.firewall.' The cable modem lights blinked for a bit, and then the friendly # prompt reappeared. Hmm.

Query eth0. Hey, look, an IP address! But can I get out? I pinged my ISP. Why, I have ICMP packets coming back to me!

All systems go.

The second half of the Shaw installation tag-team showed up around then, toting some installation CDs, an Ethernet card, and a little booklet with about eight zillion pages detailing their AUP. I thought about making snide comments about their inability to deal with Usenet spam, but refrained from doing so. The guy explained the deal: I could basically download as much as I want, but they'd start to notice if I was kicking up an equivalent amount of stuff. Fine with me. He asked me whether I had any Windows machines around; I tried to conceal the fact that there was in fact a Windows installation up and running on my laptop, which was unfortunately displaying a Netscape Navigator window at that particular moment.

"No," I lied. He laughed.

"Well, if it's okay with you, I'll say you're a Windows customer. We don't get paid if we don't do anything." The libertarian in me almost said, "Well, that's the way things should be," but the install wasn't costing me anything, so I told him to go ahead. He handed me the CD and booklet, pointed me at the important part at the back (where my username and password were scribbled), and said, "Thanks. That was a piece of cake. I wish more people knew what they were doing when it comes to the Interet."

"So do I," I moaned.

Life in the Fast Lane, Week One

Transfers were blindingly fast. It made me happy. It was like having my very own T1. I sucked back the source to a new version of Emacs without batting an eyelash. New kernels? Hey, no problem. While we're at it, let's take the whole freaking libc source, too! And so it went, as I grabbed package after package that I'd wanted for a long time but had never actually pulled down for one reason or another. Yeah, so the bandwidth was asymmetrical; who cared? While I was uploading the latest version of my Web site (which didn't take nearly as long as I'd thought), I could read netnews. Go me.

But somewhere around Day 3 or so, porn began to creep back into my mind. "Hey," my mind said, "I wonder how much porn I could get in a real hurry?" I wasn't particularly prepared to pay for access, but Usenet's got some decent free stuff, or at least it did the last time I checked. So I got myself a newsreader, wired myself up to my newly-local news server, and inhaled deeply -- just set it on autoscan and let it download everything in sight.

I ran out of space on the download partition that day. It was hilarious as I sorted through the directories, trying to selectively nuke all the porn that had been.. um.. sucked back. At first I considered this an annoyance, and then I realized that I'd pulled almost 400 MB worth of pornography off of Shaw's news server. And what was more amazing was the damn thing didn't even blink once. It had simply gone along and slurped anything it could find and saved it to my hard drive.

I'd heard vicious rumors about transfer limits on cable modems, but if anything like that was actually in place, I'd busted right through that limit. I figure I pulled around two GB worth of useless and useful data off the net, mostly in the form of PDFs, tarballs, PostScript documents, and MP3s through Napster. (No, I would never advocate you pirate music, but anything that pisses the recording industry off so thoroughly must be great -- you gotta love it.) And besides, my pal Soleil was probably snagging more junk off of Usenet and elsewhere on the net than I was, and he hadn't reported any bandwidth caps. So that was a load off my mind. (Just wait until the bill shows up.)

On the technical side, things looked good. Someone had told me the cable modem binds to a specific MAC address, so you always get the same IP number for each connection; having accidentally unplugged the modem twice in this period, I can say that certainly seems to be true. Shaw theoretically reserves the right to rotate your IP address on a whim (and, if you're like me, the cable modem will never know what happened and neither will you until you actually look at your address assignment), but nobody I know has had that happen to them yet. The modem went down twice on the second day for about twenty minutes each time

Mar  3 13:23:44 lauriel dhcpcd[9406]: recvfrom: Network is down
Mar  3 16:31:27 lauriel dhcpcd[9669]: recvfrom: Network is down

I was happy. Life was good. I stopped thinking about how much this latest transfer would cut into my monthly time allotment (I pay Island Net for 100 hours/month) and started thinking about how much e-mail or netnews I could get read or written while my machine was sucking back files. It was a very nice change, something I go through every time I get long-term access to a Big Pipe.

The only wart was that it was extraordinarily easy to leave telnet connections open to various places without realizing it. I have a Web site that's hosted by Digiserve, a bunch of guys who have this wonderful sense of corporate duty and are donating the Web space to me. I somehow managed to leave a telnet session open to them for a day and a half before I realized what had happened and went back to reclaim that virtual terminal.

Life in the Fast Lane, Week Two

Various resources on the net had pointed me towards speedtest.telus.net, a tool for testing out how fast your connection was. It wasn't perfect; it was at least 13 hops away from me and presumably, I'd get faster downloads from Telus ADSL simply because there were probably more direct routes -- I would already be inside, so it's faster. Still, the test results were instructive, giving me a number to throw around periodically when I was inevitably asked, "So, how fast is that new cable modem of yours?" (The answer, incidentally, reflecting only the fastest test I did, is 800 kb/sec, which is pretty meaningless to most people, and for once most people are right. Bandwidth, being so strange and variable, is heavily dependent on things that have nothing to do with the size of your pipe. My Usenet porn expeditions are probably more reflective of the true maximum speed, since those servers sit three hops away, and I wouldn't be surprised if I broke 500 kb/sec, which is about average for most of the tests I ran using the Telus site.)

I concluded that Telus's site, while marginally useful, appealed only to those people who felt the need to numerically brag about their connection speed. In my circle of nerd friends, we're now all wired for high speed access (I was really the last holdout) -- everyone has a cable modem, an ADSL drop, T1/T3 access, ISDN.. so bragging isn't as big a deal as it used to be.

Frink and I swaped IP addresses and account names and passwords; we were thus able to magically show up on each others machines at all hours of the night (well, him more than me; he keeps his system off-line when he's not using it, mostly for lack of a decent firewall right now). It's weird knowing that someone is logged into your machine and playing away without seeing them physically present, and while I trust Frink probably about as much as I trust anyone with access to my machines, it still took some getting used to -- I'd be working in emacs, and suddenly the cable modem's lights would blink, and a quick "who" would show Frink logged in and chugging away. Doing what, I don't know; I can't snoop ssh connections very easily. Good thing, too.

I discovered Sean Yamamoto's Internet Service Providers Who Suck Web page, and figured @Home would be on his shit list; it was, with an interesting story about ARP caching router fuckups and long delays in technical "support." This pretty much confirms my observation (although, strangely, not my experience) that the cable company is staffed with idiots who couldn't get jobs at the phone company, and my experience with those idiots is enough to fill a book. (What? Another phone line? Sure! Give me $160 and wait a month! We'll be out there sometime between Monday and Wednesday! Oh, you need us to come inside? Give me another $100! No, I can't give you a more precise date! Put the gun down, sir..)

Monday, 13 March

Nothing in syslog; dhcpcd would have bitched if it couldn't renew the lease and connect to anywhere. Cycling the interface didn't help -- not that I expected it would; this was a modem problem, not a Linux problem. Annoyed, and not really sure how long the outage would have lasted, I fired up minicom and dialed in instead. Meanwhile, the cable modem continued to blink the same way it does when it first starts up while scanning for a data channel and registering on the network. I don't understand enough about S-CDMA to be able to tell exactly what happens during this process, so I have no idea how long it takes or how long it should take. I tried to console myself with the knowledge that if the modem was still on the blink when I logged off and came home from my appointment -- which would have been around 1030 -- I would call Shaw and complain.

Of course, by the time I was into my third newsgroup of the day (skimming, even), the modem had reset itself and was behaving again. I re-enabled dhcpcd and told eth0 where to go and what to do once it got there. Things worked fine -- same old IP address, same old connection speed. Go me.

Sunday, 2 April

Monday, 3 April

CHANGES TO YOUR SERVICE Mar 02 to Apr 07
Add Shaw@Home Monthly Subscription              47.83 GP
Total debit for changes to your service		47.83

YOUR SERVICES FOR Apr 08 to May 07
Basic Service                                   17.34 GP
Tier 1 (A&E/CNN & more)				 9.74 GP
Tier 2 (Life/Discovery & more)			 3.49 GP
Tier 3 (Family/TBS/Comedy & more)		 5.99 GP
Shaw@Home Monthly Subscription                  39.95 GP
Total charges for your services			76.51

Total (G) G.S.T                                  8.71
Total (P) Provincial Tax			 7.49

AMOUNT DUE BY Apr 08, 2000		       141.01

Adding to my frustration was what happened at 14:30 or so -- everything became suddenly unreachable. I could ping within my own subnet, and within my local netblock, but I couldn't get out beyond the second router or so. Asking around, I discovered that Fiberlink had had an ATM switching card blow up on them and spent most of the afternoon trying to repair it. I knew I shouldn't have praised Fiberlink yesterday. I just knew it.

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