[X4U] Question that might pertain to quite a few Mac users

[David Ledger]

>From: Simon Forster <simon-lists at ldml.com>

>On 6 Jun 2008, at 03:53, Ed Gould wrote:
>>  On Jun 5, 2008, at 7:50 PM, Daly Jessup wrote:
>>>  ----------------------SNIP______________________________
>>>  How do you do THAT?
>>>
>>>>  Assuming you haven't changed things too much, look at the info
>>>>  supplied by your ISP along with the cable modem when you first got
>>>>  it. It should give you log-in details.
>>>
>>>  I don't know. I got a cable modem about 12 or 13 years ago. They
>>>  have replaced it twice since then, and the current one is also our
>>>  phone receiver thingie. Anyway, they have never given us any
>>>  documentation since the original install, and maybe not even then.
>>>  I know how to access Linksys routers, but that's all I know. I
>>>  don't think I have ever even thought of accessing a cable modem and
>>>  I meant it, what do you use? A browser? Something else?
>
>First go round would be a browser directed at the internal IP of your
>router (which you can dig out from network preferences). You can give
>that a go and see where you get to. After that, I'm not too sure what
>to suggest wrt the cable modem as it'd involve looking around and
>trying a few things depending on what turns up.
>
>So if you can't get in through the browser, let's write that off as a
>process.
>
>After that we're back full circle to see what info you can dig out of
>the Airport Extreme. I've got an Airport Express here which seems to
>offer some logging capabilities - but quite how extensive they are and
>how I take full advantage, I know not. I'm guessing I'd need to use
>SNMP to get log details and then analyse that. I don't have the time
>to look into that.

Looks like the problem is that Daly has a cable modem and a router, 
and it's been suggester that she log in to the cable modem. Many 
(most?) modern routers incorporate the modem function in the router. 
Mine does. It's quite possible that the cable modem has no login from 
the LAN side. My ADSL modem / router shows the WAN traffic info 
because it's all in the same box.

The cable modem is a cable signal to ethernet converter, so the LAN 
side is ethernet, so it has an IP address. How difficult it is to 
find that address, and whether or not it has a built-in webserver 
listening on that address depends on the specific hardware. The 
router may keep the information required though, and it may be 
available through _its_ web interface.

What I've referred to as a router may in fact be a switch (or hub), 
but then there would be no DHCP and all networked devices would have 
to have their IP addresses manually configured. This is an unlikely 
solution for an ISP to offer.

David


-- 
David Ledger - Freelance Unix Sysadmin in the UK.
HP-UX specialist of hpUG technical user group (www.hpug.org.uk)
david.ledger at ivdcs.co.uk
www.ivdcs.co.uk