Subj : TERRAYON vs. TOSHIBA boxes?
To   : All
From : Mike Luther
Date : Sun Oct 28 2001 01:59 am

For years now I've had a darn good relationship with my cable IP using the
TERRAYON cable modem.  I early adopted cable for service when it first came out
and the original Myriad crew put it in here in College Station, Texas.

Then TCA bought out Myriad, but the TERRAYON modem (TERAPRO) and their router
system stayed.

Then COX bought out TCA, and it also stayed, but .. COX wants better control
over who's in the canoe!  Sort of like the old blues song, "Now everybody knows
I've got the meanest dog in town!  How come my dog don't bark when you come
round?"

    ;)

So they brought in the DOCSIS cable puppy.

With it came first, the MOTOROLA BITSURFER cable modem.  And now here on the
desk is a TOSHIBA puppyette.  A cohort OS/2 user up in Tyler, Texas, where this
tech branch of COX leafs out faced this all months ago.  He was on the TERAPRO,
but lightning or something equally evil entered it!  Totally stable on OS/2,
they brought him out a new DOCSIS BITSURFER.

That wave wouldn't crest worth a damn.  He could connect, but couldn't stay
connected at all.  We worked between us a long time and finally he sent me in a
message to the effect that he finally got the COX tech force to admit that the
DOCSIS stuff simply would not work in certain locations for 'noise' purposes.
Allegedly, they are terribly susceptable to noise, whatever 'noise' is.  I
never got an answer to whether that was noise in the system up at the 940Mhz
range, down in the 3-30Mhz UPLINK range, on the powerline,or what.  Wasn't
talking direct to COX either.   Whatever happened, I may never know because the
fellow I was helping dropped off the face of the communicative earth faster
than Columbus hit the horizon after he got his Papal Bull in 1492!

According to what was relayed to me, even their own tech people sometimes have
to go back to the TERRAYON to get mission critical connections where one house
will be OK with the DOCSIS, but the house next door simply can't run with it!
Further, it seems common knowledge that they have had to go back to the
TERRAPRO units for many commercial customers who need mission critical
connections.

Sigh.

And now, per COX communicators, TERAYON has gone broke.  No more of any kind
around the end of the year.

So now I have a second TOSHIBA creature on my desk in a cute little puppy box.
It has useless WIN configuration software and an equally useless USB port.  But
it does have a standard cable outlet.  Obviously I know my MAC address and can
and will give that to them so that they can set it up for test purposes.  Yes,
I've got a fixed address.  And so told me they cannot use the range of fixed
addresses to give me a fixed address with it!  Aha! Insight!  That must mean it
is on a different router and the TERRAYON router I am on is going bye-bye too
when all this happens?

More curious is the game plan for DHCP.  My Tyler gent who had the trouble was
having trouble maintaining connections on DCHP.  His DCHP connection would
always lock in on boot, but even though he used the DHCPMON -t and ran through
the DHCPSTRT routine when he got dropped, it was happening every ten minutes or
so and he simply couldn't use the service any longer with OS/2.  He said he had
no apparent trouble with a WIN box similarly tied to the system.  Gloom.

So noted to me COX had to go this way because they felt like they had to have
more control over what MAC's were connected by DHCP!  What was happening was
that they would set up a cable connection in one of the thousands of
single-family homes here that have become private mini-dorms for the Texas A&M
student population.  From the they would face a dozen boxes tied to a hub all
hollering for another DHCP hit on the system from every student in the place.
I think, from what I have heard, is that they want the MAC address of every box
that gets a DHCP in advance now?


Since I use my bench for service and debug work for box after box in my flock,
what then?

Is the only choice at this rate, if that is so, is to get them all behind my
existing ZyXEL broadband router which is up behind the present TERAPRO on the
HUB as well?

So, does anyone else here have any experience with all this who can tell me
what I can expect?

Looking anxiously at this basket with a TOSHIBA puppyette in it and a December
31, 2001, drop dead date.... ;(


--> Sleep well; OS/2's still awake! ;)

Mike @ 1:117/3001



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