[NCLUG] Cable Modem Refugees

[Michael Dwyer]

Its kind of like saying, "If you phone doesn't work, call the phone
company", but if you managed to get this far, you're doing pretty
good. 

For what it is worth, I can see other people doing DHCP requests, 
but other than that, there's not much on my line right now...  

A great big LART to:
 o Excite. Thanks, guys.  No really.
 o The &%^$% woman who stole my computer at the Library.
 
A Huzzah! to:
 o AT&T, which apparently already has the East Coast back online
 o My office so I could get my bandwidth fix somewhere
 o this Anonymous Coward on Slashdot:
AT&T at Home getting re-connected HOWTO (Score:5, Informative) 
by Anonymous Coward on 17:11 01 December 2001 (#2642205)  
I'm not sure it will help a lot of people, but this is what I just did
to get reconnected. (Gotta feed the /. habit.) I'm in Fort Collins, CO
if that's relevant to anyone. I haven't got a phone call from AT&T yet.
But that may well be on account of the phone number they have listed for
me is disconnected right now.

I did try sending out DHCP requests before doing this, but never got any
replies. I wouldn't call this course of action exceptionally friendly
behaviour. But the web sites AT&T listed in some email this past week
are either unreachable [attbi.com] or have nothing helpful [att.com]. 

Listen for IP traffic coming over the modem. I did tcpdump -n -i eth0
and figured that the not-10.x.x.x router doing all the ARP requests was
the neighborhood router. 
Make note of several of the IP addresses that the router continues to
ask for and stop tcpdump. Also note the suspected router address. 
Set your IP address to one of the addresses from the previous step (see
ifconfig(8) for help on that.) Add a default route through the router
you found in the last step. route add -net default x.x.x.x ) 
Hope someone follows up with a suggestion on getting DHCP working again
or that you get a phone call from AT&T. 
Gotchas: 
You may well be hijacking someone else's legitimate IP address. And
quite possibly violating your AUP in the process. 
Your cable modem does need to think it has a good connection to the
network. Look for a set of lights glowing steadily. Or if it has a web
interface, look at that. My RCA cable modem has a status page at
http://192.168.100.1/ [192.168.100.1] 
Good Luck!