verizon pain
By anders pearson 17 Aug 2006
As the programmer in the family, I’m the defacto tech support guy. No way around it. I don’t mind too much except that I really only know Linux stuff well. I haven’t had Windows installed on any computer of mine since about 1999. If something there doesn’t work immediately, I’m about as helpless as the average Windows user would be on Linux.
So when my sister up in Maine bought her first computer a few weeks ago, I got in there early and installed Ubuntu on it while I was visiting her. All she really wants to do is basic web surfing and email and maybe upload some pictures from a digital camera. Ubuntu is way more than enough for this plus I know it well, it’s easy for me to set it up to remotely administer and troubleshoot it for her, and it’s pretty secure by default. If I’d left Windows on there it would have turned into a virus infested mess in no time and I’d probably be stuck walking her through a reinstall every few months. Honestly, if I’d been able to talk to her before she bought her computer, I’d have steered her towards a Mac of some kind, but I couldn’t so just got a cheap eMachines box and Ubuntu will have to do.
Installation was pretty straightforward. I ran into some problems just because the machine only came with 256MB of memory (which I think is criminally low). The current version of Ubuntu (Dapper Drake) installs from a livecd and livecds like to have a bit more memory to work with. So the installer was really dragging and I had to get a bit creative with going in and killing off every process that wasn’t completely necessary. If I’d known that she had that little memory, I would have either bought more for her before installing the OS, or I would have just used a slightly older version of Ubuntu that still had the seperate install disk that does everything from the command line and doesn’t need lots of memory to run. Anyway, other than that, it was completely painless. Ubuntu detected all the hardware automatically and ran smoothly once it was installed on the drive. I plugged in my digital camera and iPod and it detected them both and started up the appropriate programs without any trouble. From what I’ve seen, tables have turned and Ubuntu currently has better hardware detection and support than Windows. The camera that worked trivially on her computer, I can’t get a windows machine to recognize without manually installing drivers from a CD that I’ve long since lost.
Unfortunately, the one thing I couldn’t set up for her while I was visiting was the network connection. She’d called Verizon and ordered a DSL account from them. While I was there, she still hadn’t gotten the DSL modem/router yet in the mail. I tried to talk her into going with a cable modem instead of DSL because I know that it’s usually a much simpler setup, but the only option where she lived would have cost twice as much as the DSL and she would have had to have some things rewired to get cable to the room with her computer (or a really long ethernet cable I guess). Plus the DSL came with a phone line that she was planning on getting anyway (she’s been on just a cellphone for the last few years).
This left me in the position of having to walk her through the whole network setup thing over the phone this morning. Verizon, of course doesn’t officially support anything other than Windows XP and Mac OS X, but I have yet to meet an ISP that officially supports linux and yet I’ve always been able to get my stuff connected so I figured it couldn’t be too bad.
Oh god, was it bad. Ultimately we were able to get her online, but it was not a simple process and involved making use of a coworker’s Mac to complete one of the steps. I’m writing up the steps that we had to go through here in case anyone else out there is trying to get a similar setup working. Perhaps some of the information here will be useful.
The box she got in the mail contained a dsl modem/wireless router and a Windows/Mac CD-ROM installation disk. No instructions, no account info.
Got her to plug in the router and put the right cables into the right jacks and turn everything on. So far, so good. Ubuntu saw that it had an ethernet connection and got itself an IP address from the router via DHCP. That involved nothing beyond plugging things in and turning them on.
Then she starts up a browser and tries to go to google.com. What she gets is a website telling her that her operating system is unsupported. In other words, they set a portal system like you sometimes see with for-pay wireless networks in airports, etc. where you get an IP and everything via DHCP, but the router always sends you to a login page when you first get on so you can enter your account info and it will authenticate you. Except with the additional twist that the login webpage was doing a browser detect and not letter her even access that.
The easiest thing at this point would have been for her to borrow a windows or mac laptop from someone and go through the activation process on that. My sister lives in rural Maine though and basically doesn’t know anyone within a few hundred miles with a laptop. So our options were to either figure out some way to do it from Linux or give up and reinstall Windows on her computer for the DSL activation and then reinstall Linux after that. I don’t give that easily though.
I found some phone numbers that she could call to set up her account username and password over the phone and sent her off to do that while i did a bit more research on the problem.
My assumption at this point was that it would be like a typical portal setup and it was just a web page that she needed to get access to and there was an overly restrictive browser detect script keeping her from getting to something that would probably work just fine if she could get to it.
So next I took her through hacking her Firefox config to spoof the User-Agent string to make it report itself as Internet Explorer so she could get to the activation web page. The steps for this are:
- enter ‘about:config’ into the browser url bar and hit enter
- right click anywhere on the preferences page that comes up and select ‘New -> String’
- put in ‘general.useragent.override’ and hit enter
- enter ‘Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)’ into that box and hit enter
That worked nicely and she now had a browser that would look exactly like IE6 to Verizon’s servers. When she went back to the login page, she was able to see it this time, although then we learned that they weren’t kidding about only supporting IE and the page was a big garbled mess to Firefox (web standards? what are those?). Just to try to see what she was encountering, I got the url from her, which was for http://activatemydsl.verizon.net/ and loaded it on a Windows machine in our office. There’s a form there for entering a phone number and zip code to set up a new account, or entering a username/password to activate an existing account. So she probably hadn’t needed to do that stuff over the phone; we could have done it through the web here. But we already had the account info at this point, so I put that in and… got a page with an Active-X control. Ouch. There was no way we were going to get that working on her linux box. Actually, I couldn’t even get it to run on the Windows machine that I was on.
I got one of my coworkers with a Mac to go to the site and it gave them a .dmg file which we unpacked and ran the Mac installer program that it included. This program had us put in her account info and click through a Terms of Service agreement, etc. It ended by installing a bunch of crap on his computer and informing us that the account was now activated.
Back on her computer, she was still getting the same garbled login screen instead of websites so I figured that one of the things the installer program probably took care of was putting in the PPPoE username and password in the router’s settings.
This is usually easy enough to do manually though. I got her local IP address (192.168.1.65) and from that could figure out the router’s IP (192.168.1.1) which I had her connect to in Firefox. We hit a bit of a stumbling block here because the router didn’t come with a manual so she didn’t know the router’s admin username/password. They generally all come with the same defaults set for a given model though. I googled for the default for her router. At first I only searched for the manufacturer and not the exact model number and the default passwords listed for them didn’t work. I was starting to get worried that Verizon had installed custom firmware on the routers with a different admin password so users couldn’t mess with it or something. But when I got her to read off the exact model number to me I was able to find a different password that actually worked. From there, we just went through the router’s setup and entered her Verizon account info and everything worked after that.
At this point, I’m not sure if the step of running the installer program on my coworker’s computer was strictly necessary or if we’d gone straight into the router and put in her username/password there if it would have worked. My guess is that it was necessary though for the installer to run so the TOS could be agreed to and a flag set in Verizon’s central database saying that the account was valid. If we’d skipped that step, I think we probably wouldn’t have been able to connect even with the PPPoE username/password set. If that’s indeed the case, then it really is impossible to get a Verizon DSL connection set up without at least knowing someone with a Windows or Mac box that can do the activation for you. If it isn’t necessary, then we could have done it all from Linux (though without the router manual, we still would’ve needed to already have an internet connection somewhere so we could google the default router password).
Now, if Verizon had just made their activation process be a normal website that worked in any browser instead of a full desktop application that required a particular OS to run and had included the manual for the router they sent her, this whole process would have been almost completely painless.
My obligatory rant is how this sort of thing makes linux adoption harder than it should be. Ubuntu did absolutely everything it could to make it all easy and painless for the user. There’s nothing that any linux programmer could have done to make it easier for us. The problem was entirely that Verizon was doing a number of things that made it very difficult for a Linux box to connect. But for someone a little less persistent than me and a without the same knowledge and resources, if they’d installed Ubuntu on their computer and then tried to connect to Verizon with it, they’d come out of the experience thinking “Ubuntu must be broken. It can’t even connect to DSL.” Linux adoption is a chicken and egg problem. Until lots of people are running Linux, it doesn’t make sense for someone like Verizon to officially support it, but if it’s this hard to connect to their service, not very many of their customers are going to run Linux. As an open source developer myself, I feel some real empathic frustration for the Ubuntu developers. They’ve done an amazing job making an OS that just works out of the box for almost everything. If adoption was just a matter of writing code, they would have solved it by now. But instead, there are these external forces in play that make it an uphill battle for them no matter how great a product they create.