Okay, I've tried to be patient with InsightBB, but my patience has run out.
The upgrade ended up taking more like three hours, which I'll freely
acknowledge was mostly my fault (well, except for the Kmode STOP errors that
kept occuring when the new NIC's driver would try and start...). However,
things went from bad to worse when I actually tried to get an IP address from
Insight.
It started out okay. I had to sit on hold for a while, which was
expected. After waiting 30 minutes or so I finally renewed the adapters
on Gatekeeper, expecting to see a shiny new address come up ready for use.
That didn't happen. WAN00 (the primary external adaptor) renewed fine.
After 60 seconds WAN01 timed out. Bloody "Server not found" or
"Fatal server error" messages popped up. And kept popping up.
Finally, after something like the 10th request, I got an address!
Yippie! Oh...wait...it wasn't a shiny new IP. It's a friggin'
PRIVATE, INTERNAL USE ONLY address. One of those "UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES
CAN THIS BE USED TO CONNECT TO THE INTERNET" addresses. InsightBB it
turns out DOESN'T SELL ADDITIONAL IP ADDRESSES. THEY SELL YOU HOOKUPS TO
THEIR INTERNAL NAT DEVICE!!!
Insight, if I had wanted to use NAT to connect to the Internet, I would have
just used my existing ISA2k solution! And I used to wonder why @Home went
bankrupt...if they were run anything like InsightBB is I now understand
completely. The worst thing about the "additional IP address" is that it
costs me (after taxes, retirement, etc. adjustments to get net pay) 1 hour 9
minutes 54 seconds of work a month. For something that's completely
worthless!
Any way, I'm now looking at ADSL. I'll be able to get a cheap deal
through Purdue starting this fall, so I may switch. The only problem is
speed, so more likely is that I'd go to a solution where one adaptor uses Cable
and the other uses ADSL. The idiotic methods that must be used to do some
things...