So my FiOS line was installed yesterday. Again, for those of you who don't know what this is, look here. And so far, it's been great except for a few James inflicted issues....

All during the week, I've had people painting my yard (marking various utilities) and then digging up my yard (a nice neat trench) to run the fiber cables to my house. There was a little drama on Thursday. I walked outside to find 3 trucks from UtiliQuest (the utility marking company) and the cable digging subcontractor for Verizon all pointing at my driveway. Turns out, the electric lines that feed the houses across the street go underneath the dead center of my driveway. Oh joy. This resulted in a 3" x 3" cut in the driveway so they could make sure the fiber lines didn't take out electrical power (I agreed that that was a safety precaution worthy of sacrificing the driveway - and they promised to come back and fix it).

Friday morning and John, my installation technician, showed up as scheduled all ready to do the installation. He took a look at the wiring and where everything came in in the basement, and my ethernet switch with rack of servers and blinking lights and said, "This shouldn't be too tough." It took John about 4 hours to install the new interface box, run the cables into the house, hook up the FiOS router, install the TV boxes, test everything, and be on his way. No glitches in the install. Everything worked great.

I firmly believe that no technician should ever be subject to the insanity that's called my network at home, so I instructed John to set it up as for a "typical" customer, I would verify everything was working, and after he left, I'd proceed to destroy all of Verizon's neat consumer setup to integrate it with my network -- absolving him of any responsibility for sorting that mess out. He left me with full administrative access to the Actiontec router and pointed out the master reset button in case I did something I couldn't recover from. I get the feeling he figured out I've occasionally needed that in the past.

The only real challenge in making the setup work with my existing network was figuring out how to handle DHCP requests. Changing IP addresses on the router was easy enough, but the set top TV boxes obtain IP addresses from the router, so the DHCP server on the router had to be changed. *AND*, the router also is programmed to hand out IP addresses in the x.x.x.100 to x.x.x.150 range. And John warned me that having the set top box hand out the IP addresses was important, though I have yet to figure out exactly why...

Problem with this is that I have other devices on my network also needing DHCP addresses, and I have my own DHCP server set up to configure them as needed. And there are devices on my network which I need (okay, really, really want) to get the same IP all the time (for troubleshooting purposes - those devices also don't allow static IP assignments as best as I can tell). And, how do you handle the multiple outbound routes from my home network (there's the FiOS route out and the Comcast Cable Modem route out) without accidentally routing Comcast traffic to Verizon, and vice versa. Oh, and how to best use the now 3 wireless networks in the house (though the new one added by the FiOS router really isn't usable in most of the house because it's in the basement and the signal doesn't reach well to the second floor).

In the end, what I did was for all known DHCP clients in the house, have my DHCP server hand out a static IP based on MAC address and can access the network via hardwire or any of the 3 wireless networks. Simple enough - there's about 5 devices, and that's a limited amount of work. Servers have static IPs defined and manual routes set to route out through Comcast. Also simple enough. If you're hard wire into the network, you have a manually assigned IP (I set it up for you - and I can't think the last time someone came over to my house and needed a Cat-5 jack). 100-150 is now reserved for the televisions and that DHCP range is handled by the FiOS router. Guest laptops (or anything else I don't care to set up a static IP or permanent DHCP assignment) now connect to the second wireless network which is off a Linksys WRT54G unit which hands out IPs on its own subnet, then NAT's into the main network.

So far, this setup seems to be working well. I quickly found out when the TV's got the wrong IP addresses assigned that functions such as channel guides and OnDemand services didn't work, and the set top boxes were very unhappy. Reconfiguring my DHCP server fixed that (I think). The speed off the FiOS is as advertised - 15M down and 2M up (actually, more like 15.5M down and 1.9M up). So far so good.

More reports as I spend more time with the service.

Tags: Technology