[Discuss] Shaw vs Linux.

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2006-09-26 11:34-0700 Leamy Acoustic Art Inc. wrote:

> [...] I am looking for advise on my network,
> which recently has become quite flaky, disconnecting after about five
> minutes for seemingly no reason.
> [...]Enquiries with
> Shaw made me aware that my problem started right after they apparently
> did a firmware update to their modems, and I suspect if that's true then
> the problem is in there somewhere.
>
> First, has anyone else had trouble with Shaw that sounds similar[...]

> [...]As well, My wife's Windows machine hasn't been
> affected, which makes me suspect this might be quite deliberate.

I have very little trouble with Shaw on my Ubuntu Dapper system. Several
times a year Shaw does something that makes the external access to
the net die, but

/etc/init.d/networking stop
/etc/init.d/networking start

fixes that.

My suggestion to help isolate your problem is to try a live CD distro to see
if it has any trouble with networking with Shaw.  If that distro has no
trouble, then that eliminates a lot of possibilities (such as your computer
hardware in general, network card, your cable modem hardware, or Shaw's
firmware update of that modem), and I think that only leaves the possibility
that some of your distro software having to do with networking (kernel
version, nic modules, networking configuration files) has somehow become
corrupt/non-functional on your system.

Alternatively, if you cannot get any live CD distro to network reliably on
either of your computers (you can try live CD distros on your wife's computer
as well without permanently affecting anything there), then that points
to something to do with the modem.

Anyhow, let us know your Shaw networking experiences with live CD distros.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the Yorick front-end to PLplot (yplot.sf.net); the
Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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