alice$ ifconfig en0 | awk '/inet / {print $2}' | xargs whois | grep NET
Comcast Cable Communications, Inc. EASTERNSHORE-1 (NET-24-0-0-0-1)
Comcast Cable Communications BAYAREA-9 (NET-24-4-0-0-1)
Yes, it's true - I've signed with
the one ISP I wanted to avoid in the first place. And no, getting an internet connection around here is no fun: it's awkward (a 30min. chat session with some hotline monkey just to get my order through?) and expensive:
42 USD for 6Mbps? Come on. "with scorching speeds up to 4 times faster than 1.5 Mbps DSL" - what? Oh, and for
$ 66,95 one can order the Blast! package, with speeds "up to 16Mbps", with a magic "Powerboost" feature: "PowerBoost provides bursts of download and upload speeds for the first 10 MB and 5 MB of a file, respectively". Dude, wtf? Unfortunately the competition is no better: you have to subscribe to an
High Speed Internet Elite package to get 6Mbps, for 33 USD a month. However,
DSL is not available at my place, so I have to stick to the one and only cable provider servicing this area. Welcome to the silicon valley. On the plusside: 5 days after I signed up, I was online - pretty impressive, compared the adventures one has to go through
back home.
Oh, and winter
has finally arrived, I even had to scratch hoarfrost off the car tonight - brrr. So much for
global warming. Good job, Greenpeace :-\
Oh, another thing: I was provided with a
DOCSIS 2.0 certified
cable modem, assigning the public IPv4 address to the
connected device. Which is kinda neat: now we don't have a strange NAT blackbox in our way to do "stuff" :-) However, since configuration is done via
DHCP, the hostname is modified too. With MacOS 10.4 and /etc/hostconfig still being used, we can avoid that by setting HOSTNAME="foo". So, it's basically
dhclient's supersede option in Apple speak :)