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!