We’ve just gone live with our newly activated ADSL connection. As of 5:00 this evening, I was able to plug in the aforementioned modem that we bought on Friday and successfully connect to first Qwest’s initial login page, then, well, everywhere else! Of course, everybody’s test to see if they’re connected is Google. Well, not everybody. The modem and the Qwest disc would rather you connect to their homepage, but it’s still essentially the same thing.

I had to spend a little time figuring out the best configuration, and I decided to go with the transparent bridge setup, where the modem simply acts as DSL-to-Ethernet translator and all other router functions are disabled. In the same manner, I am able to put in all of the primary internet login information directly into the Wi-Fi router and everything works like a charm.

Of course, with this setup, port forwarding is working wonderfully. I’ve already opened ports from a telnet server that I have running on my main computer, as well as a few webservers that I have not yet been able to figure out permissions on. For some reason, only the localhost can access it. I’ll be sure and fix that before I give any updates on where they are or what they do.

When Andrea got home from work and settled in, she turned on her laptop and managed to get on without telling me. I was a bit suprised, mostly because I was still configuring the whole system and relying on the assumption that nobody would be immediately demanding service from it. But I haven’t heard any complaints yet. She had her laptop down on the coffee table with Astronomy Picture of the Day loaded. I mentioned it and her exact words were, “I was waiting for it to load and it just appeared!” So obviously this system is better than I had anticipated. Apparently 1.5Mbps is a TON better than 28Kbps…nearly 54 times as better in fact.

Anyway, yes, we are up and running and everything is functioning perfectly. There are no extraneous redundancies such as making the modem work as a second router/firewall, so we don’t have double-network problems to work through. Of course, we still have to call Integrity and get all our stuff filtered, and since we’re all on a pretty much parallel network, it won’t be easy to get everyone proxied through them unless we install the hardware solution. That’s about the only way I could think to make filtering work…and how would that affect my port forwarding requirements? I really really don’t know. I hope this works.

Yep! Everything’s just fine and dandy here!!