[UFO Chicago] SBC/Yahoo DSL Service

[Richard Royston]

SBC/Ameritech is "upgrading" its ISP service to SBC/Yahoo. The only
information available on what this involves is for Windows. It consists
of running an update program that comes on a CD (or that you download)
which does totally unspecified things to your system and registers you
with Yahoo.

Yahoo's help folk don't know about ADSL (or at least won't talk about
it). All queries are answered by saying "Please do what we ask you, and
oh, by the way, we don't support linux". They won't give me any
technical information, so I can't plan how to avoid problems.

 They want me to go to the nearest Windows machine and do something at
their web site and then, they say, all will be well. I am sure that if I
do something online on a Windows machine my registration will be
transferred from SBC/Ameritech to SBC/Yahoo. I am not as sure that all
will be well with SBC/Yahoo's ADSL support.

I have some specific technical concerns, which I will detail, and about
which I would  greatly appreciate any comments.

However, if anyone has actually "upgraded" to Yahoo using the procedure
they (Yahoo) have told me to use, and found that it worked without
difficulty, that would be very reassuring.

If anyone has upgraded and encountered problems that they were (or, for
that matter, were not able) to solve, I'd appreciate hearing about their
experiences. Please be clear whether you're giving me your experience of
going through this upgrade, or whether you're giving me your wisdom
based on other experiences.

My technical concerns are as follows. As I understand it, my PC is
connected to a DSL modem by an ethernet cable, over which TCP/IP packets
pass. The modem is connected to my phone line, over which DSL signals
pass, and the other end of the phone line is connected to another modem
(or some similar arrangement) that converts the information back to
TCP/IP.

SBC/Ameritech appear to accept vanilla PPPoE packets. According to
Roaring Penguin, however, some ISP's require PADI and PADR frames with
special Service-Name tags (i.e. not vanilla ones). PPPoE does not
provide an automatic way of finding this out and adjusting to it; you
have to know what is required and provide that information to pppd at
start-up. Yahoo help people won't discuss this, and almost certainly
don't know about it anyway. So I can't find out what SBC/Yahoo does.

I know it's probably O.K., but I'd like to know before I give up my
existing and working connection that I am going to have a successful new
connection.

Thanks for any help

Richard Royston