David VanHorn wrote:
> Comcast came out today to fix their problem that had my phones showing
> "disconnected number" for two days.
> 
> In the process, their guy picked up my twisted pair cable that runs between
> the two houses, and cut it into multiple pieces, and then went inside and
> threatened my wife.

You have got to be kidding... Holy shit, that's rough. And completely and 
utterly illegal on this side of the pond - IIRC it's considered "criminal 
damage". Not sure what the latter would be, it's probably covered by one of 
the many 'antisocial behaviour' laws.

> I'm really pissed at this vandalism of my equipment, and the way he treated
> my wife.
> I was here, but in the office, and apparently he didn't feel like dealing
> with me.

First rule: most bullies are cowards. He probably thought you'd confront him 
about the illegal destruction of your property.

I hope you got the guy's name, or at least a company ID number of some 
description.

> Comcast is telling me that they won't allow me to run "a wire" between the
> two houses.

If I were in your position, I'd find the address of the nearest Comcast 
office, go down there in person (complete with butchered cable), slam said 
cable down on the desk, and DEMAND to speak to someone in a position of 
authority. If they don't deal with it to your satisfaction, gather some proof 
and call the papers. A bit of negative publicity can work wonders. As can 
threatening to cancel your subscription -- if you can get a couple of (dozen) 
other folks together to do the same thing, so much the better.

Seriously, I wouldn't let this go...

That said, I'm also not surprised it was a Comcast tech that did it.

> In the meantime, I need something wireless that is reliable, and will couple
> the lan on one side to the lan on the other side, over a distance of roughly
> 10'
> 
> I could run wifi on the individual computers, but relative to my gigabit
> lan, it's slower than snail snot in january.
> Any ideas?  I have a pair of Belkin wifi routers, and other common wifi bits
> and pieces, but I've never tried to get them to work in this manner.

A couple of Twibright Ronjas? See <http://ronja.twibright.com/>

You could set up an encrypted ad-hoc WiFi link over the two routers (assuming 
they'll work in this fashion). Use SSID cloaking, WPA at max strength, and 
whatever else you think is necessary.

If the routers won't do ad-hoc mode, set one as an access point an the other 
as a client. Most routers and bridges will support that mode, it's just that 
ad-hoc mode tends to be a bit faster. That's mainly because there's no access 
point management traffic to deal with, but also because APs will try and keep 
some spare bandwidth around 'just in case'. Ad-hoc is pretty much 
peer-to-peer, so it only has to allocate bandwidth for the two machines. A 
pair of 802.11G (54MBit) routers on different RF channels (one on six and one 
on eleven, say) should get you close to 100MBit/sec, but going higher than 
that wouldn't be easy without having to deal with channel crosstalk (is that 
the right term?).

-- 
Phil.                         | Kitsune: Acorn RiscPC SA202 64M+6G ViewFinder
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