Cable/DSL dilemma

[Gerald Combs]

According to my DHCP client logs I've been getting lease times of 86,400
seconds (one day).  However, I keep getting the same address when I renew.
My experience has been that this happens indefinitely as long as my box
stays up.

I have an old clunker PC with two NICs that I'm using as a firewall, DNS,
NTP, and CallerID server.  One NIC is plugged into the cable modem, and
one is plugged into a hub along with the other computers in my house.
I've been using the ipfilter package under OpenBSD and FreeBSD to do
firewalling and network address translation between the two networks.
Many others on this list have been using Linux to do the same thing.
You can also pick up a small router designed specifically for this
purpose for $100 - $150.

BTW, I've always been skeptical of claims that DSL is somehow inherently
better than cable.  Both have multiple congestion points between you
and the Internet at large, and the responsiveness of both is similar
to many LAN-based technologies.  As you add more and more connections,
performance drops in a non-linear fashion.

On Fri, 22 Dec 2000, Chris Mitchell wrote:

> Has anyone here been successful with subnetting their own network with a cable modem connection?  
I have not tried yet but am skeptical since it is a dynamic IP. Heck I haven't even bothered to 
figure out how long the lease life is on an IP that RR leases on it's network.  Does anyone know 
that?  I guess it wouldn't be so bad if the lease life was, say, 75 days.  Anyway I have been 
tempted by the fruit of DSL with Futurenet but am skeptical of performance because their 
competitive package's bandwidth for transmitting is 128K (download is around 600K).  I like doing 
the online gaming thing and heard complaints from DSL users.  I smoke with my cable connection, 
granted I am fighting for bandwidth and don't have a dedicated connection to a switch.  Anyone know 
of a program that gives upload/download speeds on a network connection so I can check my cable 
connection?
> 
> Chris Mitchell
> bonovox at kc.rr.com
> squish362 at yahoo.com
> mitchec2 at leavenworth.army.mil
> 
>