Cable Modems and OS/2: Installation Day

Taking the plunge

ut of course, all the information on cable modems in the world is meaningless without some information about using them with OS/2, right?

For months before I finally got connected, I had been teased by Access Cable's promises of "one more month". So I spent a lot of time reading OS/2 networking newsgroups and found that many people were discussing their personal experiences with cable modems and OS/2. I was encouraged by the reports I saw, but there were enough questions, complaints and pleas for help that I wasn't completely sure OS/2 would work.

Talking to my cable company provided the same unpleasant answers that many others had heard: "we only support Windows 95, Windows for Workgroups and the Mac," or, "The Wave doesn't support OS/2."

I didn't give up though, and speaking with actual technicians revealed that these claims were based more on marketing than technology. I was assured that "The Wave" would indeed work with any OS that supported typical networking protocols and hardware.

So I took the plunge and ordered the service. Before you can purchase an Internet connection through Access Cable, you must first purchase basic cable TV programming. Since we didn't already subscribe to this service, the installation people had a double duty to perform when they got here.

First the actual "cable guy" arrived, drilled his holes in various places, ran coaxial cable from the pole to my TV and computer, and plugged that cable in to my VCR and the actual "cable modem".

The entire hardware setup is actually quite simple. The connection is a coaxial cable, just like the one plugged into the back of the TV set, which connects to a small metal "brick" which sits on the floor or your desk. This is the actual cable modem, in my case a Lancity unit.

From there, a typical networking twisted pair wire runs into a Network Interface Card (also known as a NIC) which fits in any open expansion slot in your computer. The cable company provides either an ISA or a PCI based NIC, depending on your needs (this is covered by the installation fee). The cable modem has a few green indicator lights but except in an outage situation they are mostly redundant so there is no problem sitting the unit on the floor.

An interesting advantage to this placement is that the unit has "fins" which are actually heat sinks and they are nicely curved so they fit the arch of a foot. If your feet get cold, you've got an instant foot warmer! (Please note, my cable company did not recommend this use for the equipment but I've noticed it runs at slightly above body temperature so...)

The Lancity modem is a proprietary unit, as are all units so far manufactured. At this stage in the industry, you will be required to use the same brand of hardware as the "head end" (i.e. the connection at your cable company) so you will be leasing the unit from your provider. In my case, as in the rest of Canada and probably the US, this lease fee is included in the price of the monthly service. Later, as standards emerge, it may be possible to purchase a modem and reduce monthly charges, but that time is still distant at this point.

One person writes on a Rogers Cable web page (Rogers is one of the largest cable companies in Canada):

...it would seem that if a cable company was dependent on security and management features built into the cable modem, that they would want to maintain ownership of that modem. This is similar to what is done with cable television decoders. So it may be some time, if ever, before we see cable modems available on store shelves.

Proprietary units aside, you will not have to worry that there will not be drivers for OS/2 for the particular cable modem your local provider chooses. This is because the equipment acts exactly like a normal LAN (or, more accurately, a WAN, connecting to a normal NIC. Thus, any 10BaseT Ethernet card that has OS/2 drivers will probably work with the cable modem. If the one provided by the company doesn't work, some people have reported purchasing their own 3Com cards to solve the problem. In my case, the PCI based D-Link card provided did the trick.

Ding Dong. Cable Guy... er... Cable Gal?

The next step to the installation is getting the hardware to work with your operating system and, as you can imagine, this is the moment of truth for any OS/2er. A separate technician arrived shortly after the first one and she took care of this end. After quickly installing the NIC that the earlier technician had left, she moved on to the software end of things.

As advertised, Windows 95 was required (sorry NT, Linux, OS/2, and BeOS users), but luckily I had a licensed copy of the Win95 CD that someone gave me years ago. I had installed it on my C: partition (previously inhabited by Win3.1) the day before. With this freshly installed base to work with, the technician slapped in the Win95 CD, added some networking protocols, set up a few passwords and, to my surprise, that was that. In fact, if she and I had kept our mouths shut while she was here, the whole thing could have been done in less than half an hour.

Naturally one of the first things any good company technician does is to show off how well their service works and my friendly cable gal did not disappoint. Since I had not installed any software on my Win95 partition (because I had no intention of using it) she asked if I preferred Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator. I had hardly gotten the last syllable out of my mouth before she had opened a connection to the server at cable headquarters and began an install of the latest Navigator for Win95, over the cable modem. Within seconds, the software was installed. Not downloaded, installed. Needless to say, I was impressed.

Without being too annoying, I explained to her that I would be repeating her efforts, but with OS/2, after she left and asked for a few pointers. She was helpful and answered any questions I could think of. Armed with these answers and my experience watching her set up the system, I thanked her and she took off to make someone else's day. I set about making the service work with OS/2...

Finally, OS/2

And naturally, it wouldn't work.

Months ago I got adventurous and followed some advice I had found (again, in that darn vol. 16, no. 6 of PC Mag, this time on p. 376) on cleaning out an OS/2 system. If you don't have networking installed, the theory went, you don't need a lot of files that Warp 4 installs by default. So, in a fit of housekeeping, I deleted a ton of non-vital files. Needless to say, when you then decide you do want networking support installed, you need those files back.

I got a few errors and since I was starting to panic, I decided to just start fresh and reinstall Warp 4. Once I did, my problems ended (for the most part).

If anything, the "installation" with OS/2 was actually faster than with Win95, reinstallation of the OS notwithstanding. Warp 4 automatically detected the D-Link card and installed drivers for it. Since Access Cable uses a Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) server, I chose the setting for DHCP in the appropriate place in the setup process. Warp then asked me to do the normal networking setup of any protocols I wanted. I selected TCP/IP and continued.

Hello? Is this thing on?

The first problem that I had was actually my own ignorance. When setting up Win95, the cable technician had installed TCP/IP (for normal 'net stuff), IPX (for a local game server they have running) and NetBEUI (to share files across the local network). Because of this last one, NetBEUI, the Win95 system requests a password and logs me on to the network each time it boots. I had not installed NetBEUI with OS/2 at first, so there was no such logon prompt. My machine booted and just sat there. So, naturally, I thought there was some other step I had to take to get things going.

Feeling a little foolish because I didn't know what to do next, I called one of OS/2 e-Zine! 's local networking gurus. When he said to try pinging some hosts, I explained that I hadn't gotten connected yet but he told me that yes, indeed I had.

To my surprise, he was right. I was able to ping the company's name server, although nothing else. We quickly found that I had not set the router's IP address, so I opened the TCP/IP Configuration Notebook (just open a command prompt and type tcpcfg.exe followed by Enter to do this) and did so. We had to guess at the router's IP address since it was not provided by the technician when she was here, but it followed a fairly standard formula and my "expert" got it right on the second try (and he has my deepest gratitude and respect because of it). There are various other settings that you may want to tweak in this notebook, including what services to auto-start at boot time, so you might look through its pages at your leisure. (And by the way, this notebook contains settings that are helpful for all systems, even ones that only use dialup Internet connections. Have a look at it.)

Once that was done, the machine was on the 'net, as simple as that. I fired up Navigator for OS/2 and PMMail, and sure enough, I was airborne. Transfer speeds were identical to what I had seen with Win95 use and everything seemed to work well. (There were a few minor exceptions to this: isolated FTP sites behaved oddly, but this is probably not related to the cable modem, and my ISP either fixed them quickly or is currently working on resolving them.)

The next step

As I mentioned, the cable person installed IPX and NetBEUI for Win95 when she was here. I passed on IPX but thought I'd take a shot at NetBEUI. I didn't see any reference to NetBEUI as a protocol I could install for my new network during the initial setup phase, but luckily, a few months ago, we published an informative article by our very own Brian L. Juergensmeyer on getting OS/2 to work on a Windows network with NetBEUI. Basically, NetBEUI is called "File and Print Services" in the OS/2 network installation utility, and once I knew that, I had it set up in no time.

I must say though, the obtuse naming convention that IBM used for NetBEUI was not the only strange default behaviour I observed. While everything worked well without tweaking, the setup was much less user-friendly than it should have been. Many icons and notebook pages were unfamiliar and named differently than their Windows counterparts (NetBEUI is, after all, a widely used Microsoft protocol, so why not just call it NetBEUI?).

Also, in some cases the OS/2 Warp tutorial indicated default icons, locations and names for objects while my system actually used different icons, locations and names. For example, I had to go looking for the "logon" object and I could not find any object to change my password, although the tutorial said there would be one in the "Connections" folder.

And many network related objects were scattered around my system. Some were in the "Connections" folder, some in the "System Setup" folder, and some in other places.

However, with a little digging and playing, everything did work. I was able to log on to the local cable network and download files from their server (an NT server, by the way). And, of course, all these problems are OS/2's fault, not my cable company's.

Overall, installing a cable modem from Access Cable with OS/2 Warp 4 is not hard at all. Anyone with any computer experience (even those with no networking experience) should be up and running in less than an hour. (For a complete check-list of what you'll need to set up OS/2 Warp 4 for cable modem access, see the step-by-step installation instructions in this issue.)