So I was helping someone from work setup an ADSL connection so that they could connect to the office VPN. They’d signed up with Xtra which I’d assumed was fine, ADSL is just ADSL after all. The router had come from Xtra and they had pre-configured the username to something that looked sensible. I’d done the rest of the configuration in advance too just to make things as easy as possible.  When everything was eventually connected, the ADSL synced correctly and once we put the account password in it appeared that the connection was up and running. This is how things should have progressed but of course the connection wasn’t actually active otherwise I wouldn’t be writing about this now.
Name resolving worked implying there was actually some connection but nothing else did. We rang Xtra only to be told that we needed to factory reset the router and run their setup CD as the account wasn’t “activated”. I enquired as to what this CD actually did since we didn’t want it messing with all the network settings and all the guy would tell me was that it “converted” the old dial-up account to work with broadband. He told me he could tell it wasn’t working because the domain on the username was “wrong” (remember this is a default set by Xtra). I asked what it should be but he was refusing to elaborate any more so even though I knew it would stuff up the network settings I eventually just gave up and said I would run the CD since it would have never got resolved otherwise (He’d repeated the same instructions of resetting the router and using the setup CD numerous times at that point).
The CD of course didn’t work on the first try, it fell over scanning for a Java Virtual Machine (<sarcasm>because obviously you need one of those for broadband</sarcasm>) and after some fiddling around we gave up on that and tried another computer which thankfully was lying around. I hooked it up to the modem with an ethernet cable and then tried the CD again. This time the JVM test finished. It needed to install Java and it passed all the other prerequisites (one of which was Macromedia Flash of all things). So I had done a factory reset of the router as the Xtra guy suggested but when I got to the point that their CD was trying to scan for the modem it couldn’t find it. I checked the networking and everything was fine, I could load the admin page in a web browser fine. After removing all the unnecessary devices and many more failed attempts at scanning for the modem I decided to disable the Windows firewall. Suddenly the modem can be found. The installer asked for a few details for both the broadband and the wireless network which I entered and bingo, the internet was available.
So with the main problem out of the way I started looking about what their CD setup had done to the router. Stuffing up the network settings was a given, I was more interested in what they changed. It left the default admin password, default NAT mappings, the wireless was left on the default channel 6 (like everyone else’s) and was discoverable and open to all connections. I fixed these security problems and then tried to find what part of the setup was actually different to what it originally had been before using their CD. Eventually I found it. It was the username. Just the username. They let me stuff around for two hours forcing me to redo all the network configuration on the router and two computers with their broken CD setup for the want of a username. I want my two hours back dammit!
On the slim chance that anyone managing this stuff at Xtra is actually reading this here’s some advice. Make a CD that actually works. Don’t assume people don’t run firewalls. Don’t make the CD setup harder than doing it manually by hand. If you’re going to auto-configure things, do it properly without leaving security holes. You only need to know five details to setup an ADSL connection, a username, a password, VPI, VCI and a connection type. The later three are always “0″, “100″ and “PPPoA VC-MUX” in New Zealand anyway so in practise all we need is a username and password. Don’t hide these from us, just tell us. Send us a fucking bit of paper in the mail with them written on their like all the other ISPs that actually have half a clue. Grrrrrr….
