Thursday, September 14, 2006

Comcast Cable Bill

Greetings
I came home this evening to find the internet in my apartment shutoff. To my dismay I remember that I was at least a month behind on paying the cable bill. I decided to play with a few things and had some interesting results. I was not able to surf to a webpage by using my browser, however I was able to play my playlist which consisted of streaming radio. So I decided to check on a few things. I found that I was not able to ping any websites using their url instead of their exact ip address.

Example

blogger.com
instead of: 66.102.15.100

A quick whois query will help you to determine an ip address of a webpage.
Comcast as far as I can tell denies you access to their DNS servers. I simply changed my TCP/IP settings to not use the default DNS servers and entered my own. I then released and renewed my ip address and everything is working again. I should also point out that comcast does a soft turnoff of your internet before they come and do a physical disconnect. After the physical disconnect is done then you are out of luck. So don't forget that you need to pay your bill just because the internet is still working. I thought this was an interesting little technology work-around, and maybe some fellow comcast customers will get some use out of this. I will be stopping by my local comcast location tomorrow to pay my bill.
Enjoy

 

"Perhaps your grip on reality is not quite as firm as you might have hoped" - Todd Connelly


"They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin

Words are chameleons, which reflect the color of their environment. -Learned Hand, jurist (1872-1961)

What does all of this do to the best minds among the students? Most of them endure their college years with the teeth-clenched determination of serving out a jail sentence. The psychological scars they acquire in the process are incalculable. But they struggle as best they can to preserve their capacity to think, sensing dimly that the essence of the torture is an assault on their mind. And what they feel toward their school ranges from mistrust to resentment to contempt to hatred – intertwined with a sense of exhaustion and excruciating boredom.

--Ayn Rand Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal