Topic: Telstra Stories

[Luke Drumm]

Hi,

I'm planning to make the change over to (Australian) Telstra's 'Blast Off' Business Cable service. Are there any other E-smith users who've had experiences with this (or similar) service(s)?

Are there any suggestions, warnings or heavy sedatives that I should be aware of?

I've heard some horror stories from the US regarding DSL services. Do Aussies enjoy something a little better with Telstra & Optus?

Luke.

[Gordon Rowell]

Luke Drumm wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm planning to make the change over to (Australian) Telstra's
> 'Blast Off' Business Cable service. Are there any other E-smith
> users who've had experiences with this (or similar) service(s)?

Yes - quite a few of the lead developers when we live in a warmer
climate

> Are there any suggestions, warnings or heavy sedatives that I
> should be aware of?

For BigPond Advance, just install bpalogin and e-smith-bpalogin from
the contrib area.  For Optus@Home (if you can get the appropriate
commercial agreement - not sure if they have one yet), you can
just use standard e-smith 4 with the "DHCP send hostname" option.

> I've heard some horror stories from the US regarding DSL
> services. Do Aussies enjoy something a little better with
> Telstra & Optus?

I was a very happy BPA customer. It was certainly significantly
better than the cable service I am using now I'm about to try out
DSL.

Gordon

[Jason]

I am an extremely happy ADSL user...
No problems with E-smith using ADSL....

The only thing I need is a static IP from telstra so my domain will be easier to run...Gordon Rowell wrote:

[Rod]

What type of modem is Telstra supplying?
My local ISP is using the Telstra ADSL service but only supplying a USB modem and then only on a windoze/mac/Linux redhat V7.
If I have to I'll sort it out with my e-smith install but would rather not reinvent the wheel.

[Luke Drumm]

I can't offer much help here as I'm going with 'ye old boring' cable services.
The cost of ADSL just couldn't really be justified for my meager usage.

I've heard a reports around the place of some of the older network cards that Telstra were installing are a shade dodgy but nothing confirmed (and nothing that a later set of drivers didn't fix).

The specs of their current DSL or ADSL setup aren't published, AFAIK, so it may be a case of wait and see on what brand of boxes they're going with.

Luke.

[Lloyd Keen]

I'm just about to have a crack at e-smith with BPA, but I'm having a few nightmares about the dynamic IP address. I remember reading somewhere though that Primus are offering DSL with a static IP. Might be worth checking out as I don't think it's all that much dearer than cable.

[Charlie Brady]

Lloyd Keen wrote:

> I'm just about to have a crack at e-smith with BPA, but I'm
> having a few nightmares about the dynamic IP address.

I've run e-smith with Big Pond Cable for months without problems. Have a look at the bpalogin and e-smith-bpalogin rpms in my contrib area:

ftp://ftp.e-smith.org/pub/e-smith/contrib/charlieb/RPMS/.

Regards

Charlie