The last couple days I’ve been working trying to tweak my computers after installing DSL. Compared to a lot of people I’ve read about, I have had an entirely different problem: the DSL works great, Windows still sucks.
I only had one glitch with my DSL install. The technician who modified the phone line also managed to turn off one of my voice lines, which took a couple of days to get repaired. That was it. The actual DSL installation went without a hitch. Hooked the modem up, installed the software, did a few reboots and wow — the speed on this thing is incredible. It’s significantly faster than even my high speed access at work (probably because there’s only one user instead of several thousand sharing a bunch of T1 lines).
The problem I’m having is sharing the connection over my LAN — actually the install pretty much rendered my entire LAN inoperable.
I was going to just plug the DSL output cable into a LinkSys router, but Ameritech got tricky on me. They sent me a USB DSL modem — so rather than having an Ethernet cable going to my computer I have a USB cable. Which is kind of stupid since the USB bandwidth is so limited. It works great on the computer I’ve got it installed in, but only because that computer doesn’t have any other USB devices (I’d probably return it and insist on a different modem if I weren’t leaving in a year or so anyway — too much hassle for the short time left here).
Since a hardware solution isn’t an option, I was trying to configure Windows to handle both the PPP Over Ethernet protocol that the DSL modem uses while still getting the file/print sharing to work. What a pain. Ameritech doesn’t want me to do to this (though it’s not strictly forbidden in my TOS), so they have no helpful hints. I’ve read stuff online from people who have the same modem who have gotten it to work over a LAN but it involves digging deep into Windows networking features, which I’ve never understood very well.