Using Other ISPs with Linux

NTL Broadband

Like most ISPs, NTL offer support of no OS other than MS Windows, however, setting up Linux to use NTL broadband is trivial. There are a couple of points to pay attention to however: you must have a MS Windows box for registration; you must use the same network card in that box and you Linux machine.

NTL insist on sending an engineer around to "install broadband", that is, stick one end of a cable in the back of your set-top box and the other in the back of your MS Windows PC (into the network card) --- its a standard ethernet cable; they then visit a NTL website to register the machine.

Once they have left you can boot up into Linux on that same machine, or move the network card to your Linux box. Assuming a RedHat machine, as root, start up /usr/sbin/netconfig, choose DHCP, and restart the networking daemons (/etc/init.d/network reload should do it) or reboot. You should see a message like

    Configuring eth0                                        [OK]
  

That's it. You can confirm that all is ok using netstat -r which should give something like

    ............