[mdlug] ISP woes, and a partial solution

[Ingles, Raymond]

ATT Uverse wasn't working for us anymore - 7Mbit just isn't fast enough these days, not when the boys want to do Netflix and YouTube and Hulu, usually at the same time. And nobody was watching the TV channels anyway. So we bailed, and switched to Bright House. Five times as fast, and cheaper (without the TVservice). Overall, an improvement.

Ran into one problem, though - no admin password for the cable modem. How to set up port forwarding? How to change the DNS server?

I found a partial solution to the first one. The cable modem does support "UPnP". Several services have proven to work, but my primitive little home web server (an ancient Mac running NetBSD) dates from long before the whole UPnP thing. How to get the modem to forward over port 80?

I found the "MiniUPnP" project: http://miniupnp.free.fr/

Has a command-line utility to set up UPnP configurations. I was able to run it from my Linux box, and now ingles.homeunix.net lives again. Not that anyone cares, or probably should care. :)

The ultimate solution will be buying my own DOCSIS 3.0 cable modem. Then I'll have admin rights, and be able to set up the config I want, and not pay any monthly rental fees to the cable company. But for now, it's working pretty well.