back!

finally got my DirecTV DSL kit today, after a month of being on dialup. ahh, broadband is good. =) one of the first things i did once i got re-connected was to run a speed test on dslreports.com, and it showed that i’m getting around 1.03M/sec rate, as opposed to my old rate of 384k. very nice. i was pretty impressed with the kit as well. the gateway is pretty huge, but nice looking. it comes with a vertical stand, so using that, it doesn’t take up much desktop space. i was expecting to have to go out and get a network cable (i relocated the DSL modem), but the kit included that and a USB cable (the gateway lets you connect via ethernet or USB) and a buff-looking phone cable (almost as thick as the network cable). they also threw in 4 DSL line filters, which i didn’t have to use because i already have a splitter from my previous DSL installation. the software installation was pretty interesting. DTV DSL provides static IPs as part of the standard package, so i thought the setup would be similar to PB’s. not so. i first had to change my network settings to use DHCP, and then from there, log into the gateway from a browser and just followed the instructions from there. not sure what happened behind the scenes, but i do know that the gateway automagically downloaded something, rebooted itself, and after that, i got my IP, DNS settings, etc, and reconfigured the network settings to use those. anyways, i’ve got some news to talk about, which i’ll post soon, hopefully. i just wanted to post this and let my fans know (all 1 or 2, maybe 3 of you) that underactive.net is back!