On Sun, 2021-01-24 at 07:19 -0500, Mauricio Tavares wrote: > With that said, I noticed a lot of ISPs push all-in-one boxes, which > forces users to rely on the ISP's DNS and other spyware. Of course > you can put your own router+wifi between the ISP one and your > network, which most people will not do. My ISP recently messaged me saying that I'm using an old modem/router and would I like a new one? Foolishly I took them up on the offer. It used a different IP numbering scheme than my LAN, and SSIDs, so either I had to reconfigure everything on my LAN, or the router. Normally, it'd be easier to do the router (which is the route I took), but it wanted to go through lengthy reboot cycles for the smallest of configuration changes, instead of letting me set a bunch of things in one go, and has a tediously slow web interface. So I wasted well over 90 minutes just changing it's IP, switching off its DHCP server, turning off its media server, UPnP, changing WiFi SSID and passphrases, setting an admin password. I would have spent a similar amount of time reconfiguring all the badly designed so-called smart devices in the house. With many annoying ones that can't actually be reconfigured, you have to factory reset and start over discovering the device, adding it to your network, and configuring away the stupid default settings they come with. But after using their new box of tricks for a while I find that it's WiFi is broken (the 5GHz side of things disappears after a few minutes and never returns, after a while it wants to make you login to http://mymodem.modem to be able to continue to use any WiFi - you can't do that on gadgets that don't have a browser, and it does it so badly that your browser is stuck in a reload loop, leaving you with smartphones that can't get their updates any more), and even the ethernet side of things just kept stalling. So I went back to my original, many years old WiFi router and all my networking problems went away. I'm tempted to chuck it back at them and see if I can get a working one, but there's plenty of bad reports on their generally poor choice of hardware, and I've got Buckley's chance of getting past their telephone robot sentry to speak to an actual person instead of being told to use their website to debug my problem. I'm fortunate that I could use any router device, and I can simply go out and buy a good router, if I want something better, unlike some people's ISP forcing them to use a particular supplied device. And lucky that the ISP's supplied (but crappy) routers are quite configurable. Our internet is simply an ethernet port on a NTD (network termination device, or optical fibre modem) screwed to the wall. If I only used one computer, I could plug it in directly. There's no user authentication I have to do, their fibre interface is the thing that's authorised by them. But in our homes of a gazillion networked devices, a router is needed. -- uname -rsvp Linux 3.10.0-1160.11.1.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Fri Dec 18 16:34:56 UTC 2020 x86_64 Boilerplate: All unexpected mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted. I will only get to see the messages that are posted to the mailing list. _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
