I’ve been lamenting about the too-small NAT table on my FiOS router for a while now. Fortunately, a comment posted to that article by ‘Christian’ pointed me to this article which walks through the process of converting the expensive, powerful, feature-rich Actiontek router into a dumb Ethernet-to-Coax bridge, which it exactly what I want.

There’s a typically breathless article on SlashDot today about how Verizon cuts the copper lines to your house when they install FiOS, as part of an evil corporate Zionist neocon conspiracy to lock you in to Verizon’s service at the exclusion of all the other telcos who would otherwise service your telecom needs.

Last time, I noted how my Verizon-supplied ActionTec router seemed to flake out after a week or so of heavy use, such that its DNS requests started to fail. I switched my internal router to use OpenDNS instead of the router’s own internal DNS, thinking that would solve the problem.

Perhaps not surprisingly, it didn’t. However, when I awoke this morning to find my router performance sucking again, this time I poked around the logs on the ActionTek router a bit more. I ran across this gem in the security log:

The problem I reported earlier wherein my Verizon-supplied router stops responding to DNS requests has come up again, only this time it’s intermittent failure, not an outage. A couple days ago my roommate bitched that no DNS queries were resolving; at the time I wrote it off as end-user delusion, but I am beginning to suspect it was another instance of this router problem.

Having had FiOS running for less than a week, I’ve hit my first hiccup. This morning I woke up to find that all of my DNS requests were timing out. I had things like Google and GMail in my DNS cache, so those still worked, but attempts to resolve new hostnames were timing out. WTF?

I poked around the Verizon router for a bit, and the only thing untoward in the log was:

daemon.warn cLink: clink1: ioctl(DRV_GET_MY_NODE_INFO) failed, res=-1: Bad address.

The Verizon techs just left, having installed the 30/5 pipe as promised. Speed tests confirmed download speeds in the high-20Mbit/s range, though upload speeds were stuck at 2.5Mbit/s, not the specified 5Mbit/s. However, I ran two simultaneus speed tests to different servers, and both turned in 2.5Mbit/s, so I’m satisfied my pipe is as big as they say.

Today I finally submitted the work order to have Verizon FiOS installed at my house. For the last several years I’ve had a 1.6Mbps down/768Kbps up ADSL account from Speakeasy, which I love, but I just can’t stand the slowness anymore. I currently pay nearly $90/mo for my Speakeasy account (including wide-open TOS, two static IPs, and other Speakeasy-specific goodness), while Verizon will sell me 30Mbps down/5Mbps up fiber for $55/mo.