Cable Modems, MAC addresses and CPE

Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
A friend of mine called me from Alabama, where he will be working until April. One of his co-workers/room-mates is getting cable modem service put into their apartment.



My friend is on a powerbook, running OS 9.x and the service technician who came to set up the cable modem service didn't know how to setup the Macintosh (naturally). I walked the tech through setting up a new TCP/IP configuration, but then he started wanting to set up the CPE and the MAC address, claiming that a static IP was assigned by the provider once those other things are set up.



Having considered this, I suspect that all I had to do was tell him to select DHCP and let it go. Is that correct? Anything special about setting up a Mac on a cable modem that I should know?



Thatnks,

Drew

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 3
    eds66eds66 Posts: 119member
    Those techs usually need command line, so they can run the ipconfig command, which will tell them what the NIC's hardware (MAC) address is, etc. Ipconfig will also let them see if the machine is picking up the DHCP lease, DNS addresses, etc.



    I suspect not having the command prompt stumped him.
  • Reply 2 of 3
    rodukroduk Posts: 706member
    [quote]Originally posted by drewprops:

    <strong>

    Having considered this, I suspect that all I had to do was tell him to select DHCP and let it go. Is that correct? Anything special about setting up a Mac on a cable modem that I should know?



    Thatnks,

    Drew</strong><hr></blockquote>



    I'm not sure whether there are any differences between OS 9 and OS X, but I recently set up a cable modem under OS X and all I had to do was plug it in. DHCP was selected by default and away it went.
  • Reply 3 of 3
    imudimud Posts: 140member
    I had cable for a few months till I switched to DSL. When the cable was installed they used the MAC address to do a sort of auto-login type verification. It really sucked because the cable modem wouldnt work with my laptop which of course had a different MAC address. So I got a linksys router which allows you to set what its MAC address is. This allowed me to run my laptop and my desktop.
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