Wednesday, June 28, 2006

What I've learned about Time Warner Cable and RoadRunner

I've been a steady TW/RR customer for over 8 years in the Northeast Wisconsin area. In that time I've learned some useful things.
  1. IP Addresses - I was once told by RR support that their network gives out IP addresses via DHCP. Tho this may be true, you will continue to receive the same IP address as long as your MAC address stays the same. Example... I've had the same router in place for about 2 years and I've had the same IP address for just as long. I recently plugged my laptop directly to the cable modem and than when I checked my IP via IP Chicken my IP had changed. Than when I hooked the router back up I than received the same address I had previously. So if you have a router and need to change your IP address for some reason you will need to clone the MAC address of another system from your network.
  2. Cable Modem - If using the Motorola cable modem given by TW/RR you can log into the modem at 192.168.100.1 There's not realy much that can be done in there but it may help in debugging network issues.
  3. Packet Shaping and Torrents - For over three weeks in April/May we were having connectivity issues. I had tried everything to figure out the problem... recycling the power on the modem several times, connecting a PC directly to the modem, changing my IP address (see 1. above) and the disconnections continued. Than I tried "Show all connections" and did a "Status" on the "Internet Connection"/"Internet Gateway" and found two BitComet services running on my network. These services were running on a roommate's system who recently moved in and was using BitComet as his torrent client. The program itself was not running only the unseen services. After these services were disabled and everyone here now uses µTorrent the connectivity issues stopped. This may not be proof that TW/RR is packet shaping but is sure seems that way.
  4. Cable Box - I have the SA 8000HD DVR. If you hold Select for 3 sec. or until the mail icon flashes and than press the Info, the box's status pages will come up. Here are utilities for monitoring signal strength, frequency and more. Use the Volume keys to navigate and Exit to exit the status screens.
Well I'm sure there's a few other things I'm missing but I'm drawing blanks at the moment. I'll update this post as I remember and/or learn more things.


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