[H-GEN] Good practice and home networking

[Jason Parker-Burlingham]

On 9/10/07, Greg Black <gjb at gbch.net> wrote:

> The horror stories are true, so don't take advice from anybody who has
> never heard of them.  As far as I'm concerned, the ADSL device should be
> allowed to do the bare minimum required to make the ADSL connection and
> any other "features" it has should be disabled.

Funny you should mention that:  a few months ago I had the, er, pleasure of
dealing with the local cable company, trying to get a customer-bought modem
accepted onto their network.  Apparently that's not a supported
configuration for business customers:  they want you to use *their* crappy
"all-in-one" wireless + NAT + modem + switch solution.

But why *wouldn't* you want to use our equipment, they ask.  I was too
polite (and too cautious) to simply say "because it's a POS and I don't
trust it to do anything it says on the box".

Five minutes later, scant seconds after I said "please don't do anything to
the network now, we need it to run the store", the technician my customer
service rep was sending IM to changed some settings on their device, it
rebooted and killed the LAN (see "switch", above).  Charming.

jasonp