Well, I live in a rural area these days and if you want high-speed Internet access you pretty much have to go the way of a satellite connection. While I look for work I do a few installations on the side. Pretty much anything: Linux, Mac OS X, Windows.
Some family friends asked me to help with their satellite connection. I had set up the connection with a desktop PC (Windows ME) a few weeks ago and they just got a desktop-replacement laptop (HP zd7000) and wanted me to hook it up for them. We decided that it would be nice to have a small network and share the connection between the desktop and the laptop (using a 54g router with the wireless card already built into the laptop).
Unfortunately DirecWay (the satelllite firm) provided them with a fairly limited modem--its only output is a USB cable (USB 1.0 I suspect). I'm sure this is a marketing plot because when I inquired of the Indian-based tech support I was told that I could upgrade the setup to the DW6000 (with Ethernet output) for a mere $400 additional (plus a 15-month service contract). To hell with that..
How hard could it be to just hack together a setup that would work? Well, six hours later I have something working. I swear, if it hadn't been for Windows XP Pro and Norton I would have had it working in an hour.
I really hate the way XP Pro insulates you from the underlying system. Or perhaps I hate having to learn a new bag of tricks just to get it to do some basic stuff like use DHCP.
What I did was run the USB output into the desktop PC, add an Ethernet card to the desktop PC, bridge the connections using Internet Connection Sharing, turn off DHCP on the wireless router, connect the wireless router via cable to the desktop and the laptop via 54g card to the router. So the laptop requests its new IP address on boot-up from the desktop which shares the satellite modem connection with it.
It took me a while to realize that the default mode of the wireless router was to do DHCP (I wanted to let the desktop do it). Then nothing I did would let the laptop talk to the router. Very mysterious.
I finally created a virginal account on the laptop so that I could make my own mistakes.This had been purchased "as-is" from someone on EBay and so had a lot of software already installed and configured.
That's when I noticed that it not only had Norton AV on it but something called Norton Internet Security. Some sort of firewall software that had been interfering with my attempts to communicate to the router and with the desktop's attempts to communicate with the laptop. I de-installed it (no obvious way to turn off its functions) and "hey, presto", everything worked as planned.
After six hours.
I don't know why I do this. It can't be the money.
Posted by artandscience at February 15, 2004 08:00 AMHow does a satelite link compare to say DSL or cable? I saw an ad for it out here last night, and wondered if they have overcome the upstream limitations it used to have.
Posted by: michael at February 15, 2004 09:31 AMWell, I saw 180-190kb/sec download yesterday. I don't know about upload speed since I didn't upload anything yesterday. I presume it is 1/2 to 1/3 the speed of the download. Of course,
I believe it's possible to speed this up considerably if you hack the configuration (I found a couple of sites that purport to tell one how to do this).