U-verse Notwork Travesty, circa 2012

Wednesday November 14, 2012

U-verse Notwork Travesty, circa 2012

The family of technologies that have come to dominate networking and the internet are a pretty impressive lot. I caught a bit of John Meacham talking about Thomas Jefferson this morning and he said something I‘ve heard many times: Jefferson considered the state a child, that had to be raised, and groomed and nurtured. Almost every time I am forced to consider the state of these core technologies, I see none of that, but merely stagnant puddles of technology that, for its time was amazing, but today is beyond stupid. Case in point: DHCP. I moved to ATT U-verse a few years ago and wasted a TON of time trying to get it to coexist with 2 bridged Apple Airport Extremes. Switch croaked this past week and I had to revisit the issue again. This time I am at a breaking point and must either get rid of U-verse or pull another line.

I probably blogged about this before, but having refreshed my memory on it, I want to get it down. Not that it will do me any good but maybe some other poor soul who is thinking about U-verse will find this first and not just wake up in hell/Potterville.

The core of the problem is very simple: U-verse is built with Microsoft‘s tools and it does its television service using IP traffic on the network. The advantages are that you can have more units and don‘t have to have coax between each location. For that, you have to surrender to a state of martial IP law that makes most other life on your network have to live in their pen. Here‘s why: U-verse requires a special 2Wire router that does not allow you to turn off DHCP. Furthermore, it‘s willing to delegate firewall duties, but only by what it calls DMZPlus mode, wherein it will forward all packets to one device on the network. The trouble comes from two places: if you come up on the network, your DHCP request goes out on the broadcast channel and either router might respond, so there‘s a good chance you will get added to the U-verse network rather than your computer network. Also, for whatever reason, the bridging confuses the 2Wire and once confused, it will literally turn DMZPlus off and any inbound traffic just stops working.

The only solution to this is to turn off DHCP and NAT on the Airports and just have them be slaves of the 2Wire. The problems with this are several, not the least one being that the 2Wire software for managing the firewall is a complete nightmare. If you are not changing pinholes a lot I suppose this is probably not horrible, but Apple makes this very easy, covering everything from Jabber to filesharing on chat, to tomcat ports, etc. You also can‘t do things like use the Guest Network, etc. In short, your whole network is a vassalage subdivided and penned by your TV service.

So at this point my only choices are:

finally cut the cord – now that the election is over this one is looking pretty good.. may be time to jump. Politics is one of the things I watch most, but my favorite shows are now available on iTunes, e.g. Fareed Zakaria,pull another line from ATT for internet and have 2 networksget rid of U-verse and get Dish or something like that

For the whole time I‘ve had U-verse, I have had 2 different networks on my property. So if I start a call on Skype or 2Line and move around the property, it will drop for sure, rather than just pick up on the other bridged router.

Oh my, well right when I was about to post this I decided to try one more thing and it worked. When I had my cabling redone between the 2 units, I put in an extra cable. I started to think a few days about ‘maybe if the bridged airport was connected directly to the original, this problem would resolve.‘ Sure enough it did, for now. Just 2 days with one network has convinced me that I would NEVER have 2 again. I will cancel TV service in a heart beat if those are my choices. (BTW, it also got me to look at the competition and there is plenty. Oh, and we all knew this, but this article appeared today: $3B in energy in the dumpster because the overpaid suits in Hollywood won‘t make a deal for their content. Thanks, Guys, hopefully a new set of glaciers will grow where the old ones were….)

( Nov 14 2012, 03:10:43 PM PST ) Permalink

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