DSL is Here … Early

DSL has arrived here, several hours earlier than expected. Verizon had our “on” time scheduled for 6PM today, but, as of 8AM today, a recorded message from none other than James Earl Jones proclaimed that our DSL service was ready. By 9:30AM, I had my WindowsXP box and my Mac-running-Linux on line.

Installation went without a hitch, as far as the connection is concerned. There’s going to be an issue with the MSNPremium service, I can tell, because the .NET credentials are going to be all messed up. I may decide I don’t care.

So far, so good.

This afternoon, I’ll do a little re-wiring, and put Donna’s Win98 box on the system (it’s still connected to Comcast). Hopefully, I’ll be able to drop the cable modem off at Comcast on Friday afternoon sometime. That would be a good thing.

Donna’s Win98 box turned out to be the trouble-maker. She’s got this weirdo USB-to-Ethernet adapter, and the Verizon installer didn’t recognize it. So, I had to manually hack in all the appropriate settings. Of course, Verizon doesn’t tell you what all the appropriate settings are. I had to go digging through the various network and internet settings on the XP and Linux boxes to gather up enough numbers and what-not to plug into the Win98 network settings. PITA, if you as me. But, I got it going, and all three active machines are now happily chugging along on the DSL modem/router/WAP.

We’re not noticing any significant differences in throughput, even when we’re both banging away on the internet. So far, so good! I may even try getting one of those nifty wireless LAN music players that accesses the music store on a networked PC. Very cool.

I have noticed one odd thing, though, since switching over to the DSL. That’s the “Dashboard” component in the WordPress admin screens. There’s no content there, besides what’s local to my blog. There’s usually WordPress news and information feeds there. I’d like to get that working again, but, it’s not going to kill me if it’s gone forever. Though, I do wonder why….