The new box (DSL equipment) arrived yesterday, the same day that billing for the service started. I had elected to do the installation myself cause that way I would learn details that I am curious about. I have spent about five or six hours on each of both days and now it is pretty much working. Just now I am listening to music from a Detroit Internet “radio” station. I am transmitting from the new box upstairs to where I am writing this downstairs. I am using an 802.11g PC card in my Mac laptop. The only wires to my Mac are power and ear phones.

I would have taken about an hour if I had known everything I needed to know. Here are some of the things that I found out the hard way. The phone help was good and the hold times were short. e-mail help was good too.

There are three passwords you will need for the Yahoo service, and probably other services as well. If I had realized that there were three I would have saved a few hours of confusion.

The box and its “System” Password

The system here is the box that arrived yesterday. Its brand name, in my case is 2wire. A filter connects to the wires from the phone company and delivers phone signals to your phone and the DSL signal to the box. You phones work as before. The box also connects to your computer(s) any of three ways: It includes somewhat complex software and deserves to be called a system. The system password lets you tinker with settings in the 2wire. There are many things to tinker with but you may not need to change anything inside the box. The only one I wanted to tinker with was the WEP password (see below). The way that you do this is to point your browser to “http://172.16.0.1” There is a whole interactive web site in the box which you access with your browser.

WEP key or password

WEP stands for “Wired Equivalency Privacy”. The box serves as a base station when it does the 802.11b wireless stuff. Anyone who wants to use your box wirelessly needs to know the password or key. WEP is a cryptographic protocol which protects your data while it is moving wirelessly between your computer and the box. The “Wired Equivalency” points out that anyone who could observe your internet traffic before the wireless can still do so. WEP tries to make sure that it won’t be any easier to tap when you are doing wireless. WEP isn’t a very good protocol but if you are worried about someone seeing your traffic ordinary wire tapping should worry you more. (I am a professional paranoid!)

To get back to the WEP key, which Apple calls the WEP password, you can find it on the bottom of the box between square brackets like this [243546576879]. Beware that when you use it you must precede it with a $, thus: $243546576879. Anyone who connects wirelessly to your box will need to enter that string with the $, unless you turn off encryption. Some of the literature neglects to tell you about the $. With a browser and the system password you can change the WEP key or even disable encryption.

Yahoo password

Different still is the password to reach the ISP like service such as Yahoo in case of the SBC-Yahoo combo. You choose a “user name” at the same time as this password.

Until I stop tinkering with this for a few days I won’t know how reliable it is. The box includes fire wall function that can be configured via the browser.