I switched from comcast to verizon DSL recently ($15/month with one-year contract). I was expecting to deal with PPPoE on my OpenBSD based router. I did a whole lot of research and found out that kernel PPPoE support is not very stable in 3.7 (the version my box was running). So I even installed OpenBSD 4.0 on an old box and tried to make a distribution on the Soekris box.

 However, after struggling for a whole afternoon, I figured out that DSL is not using PPPoE! I didn’t have to do any change to my box. What I have is a Westell 6100 box, it’s a DSL modem combined with a router. All you need to do is disable the router (set it to bridge mode) and plugin your own router. Make sure you release the DHCP lease before doing that.

Thanksgiving gift? I don’t want to be a guinea pig though. The last time I tried RC1, many video codecs didn’t work. I would wait till these codecs are stable.

It’s a long story. But I ended up running Windows 2003 on my new hardware. Biggest problem so far is that Windows Media Player doesn’t play dvr-ms on it. The solution I found is to copy sbe.dll sbeio.dll and encdec.dll from a XP machine and run the following:

regsvr32 %windir%system32sbe.dll regsvr32 %windir%system32encdec.dll

It turns out that encdec.dll I copied from MCE 2005 doesn’t work. So I copied another one from a normal Windows XP SP2 and it did work.