Today our new DVD player arrived, as did the Linksys thingy to connect us up to Vonage. Nothing worse than having two new things to play with at once.
The DVD player is cheap and nasty (you can flex the drawer) but it plays all regions and converts from PAL to NTSC, so it'll play all of our DVDs. It also does composite video, as does the cheapish and nasty LCD TV we bought, so it's all good. Minor wrestling with the TV and DVD player had them both agreeing to fill the entire screen (or thereabouts) with a movie.
Vonage, on the other hand, took a bit more work to get up and going. It wasn't immediately obvious from their website what ports I needed to NAT through my firewall, and my home network is far from what they'd expect the typical customer to have, so I had to call up their support number. After about 3 layers too many of their automatic menu system, and too long on hold, I got to speak to a hard to understand Indian guy, who fortunately was able to tell me without too much prompting, that I needed to allow UDP ports 10,000 to 20,000 through. All good.
Next, I was having problems logging in to their website. I'd requested a password reset via the site a few times to no avail, so another call to their support line, and another round of the pushing buttons and waiting on hold got me another hard to understand Indian who after trying to reset my password a few more times declared he was only good for "basic" support, and needed to put me through to the "advanced" people. The advanced guy reset my password again, and swore black and blue that he could log in as me.
At this point, I twigged, and tried Internet Explorer instead of Mozilla Firefox. Worked fine. So I can't believe that
- in this day and age, Firefox isn't supported for some stupid reason
- it isn't a known issue, and they didn't ask
Being a naturally curious and networky kind of guy, I ran a tcpdump of the entire initial setup, from when I first turned the Linksys doodad on, but I'll save writing about that for another time.