Nobody gets to see the wizard!

We have pissed off at least three Comcast customer service reps, two at BestBuy, and even one at Circuit City, by trying to find a self-install CD for a cable modem.

We ran the cable ourselves---we know what we're doing with that spool of quad-shielded RG6 in the garage---and all we needed was the installer wizard CD to turn the service on with the modem I bought. Nobody had them. The wizard isn't downloadable from Comcast's web site either.

It turns out that Comcast does not allow self-installs, in this region at least. Installer appointment is tomorrow.

Then I'll be able to download James Rummel's Christmas present in less than half an hour.

Update: We is up, five-by-five, the tech even respliced my drop and put a new 3-way on the garage for me. No charge (not surprised---they save themselves $125, the cost of a truck roll, with five bucks worth of parts and fifteen minutes of labor). Now I have parts to take back to Home Depot.

The only hitch was getting Earthlink's mail servers to accept outgoing messages from outside their modem pools. The solution was right there on their support site.

I'll have to do some sleuthing with Norton Personal Firewall too, to make sure it doesn't interfere with getting a new IP lease every 4 days.

Oh she's WickedFast.

Next up, the 802.11g router. I wanna blog from bed on the Portable Subrosa Media Access Platform. Anybody ever get Linux to play with an 802.11g PCMCIA card?

Update 2: There is no wizard. It's only an http secure site that the tech logs into, and enters the modem's MAC address and his password, which then lights up the modem.

Note, there's an IP address that Comcast DOCSIS subscribers can hit, to see their upstream and downstream frequencies, modulation formats, SNR, signal levels and so forth, that is read directly from the registers of the DOCSIS cable modem termination system (the hardware at the receiving end from the cable modem).