Remote Login to the Command Line

The other day I was away from home when my wife called up and asked me where I'd put the papers I'd promised to print out.

I let out a very soft damn, because of course I'd forgotten to print out anything.

But all was not lost. I simply logged onto my home computer, found the appropriate file, and printed it, on my home printer. She was suitably impressed.

This, of course, is the whole point of a long-ago post, where we figured out how to determine a router's external IP address. What we want to do today is to use that information to log onto one of your home computers from afar. We'll assume you have figured out your current dynamic IP address, perhaps by looking at the bottom of your gmail page, or using the software I assembled in the previous post.

So let's say that you've found that your router currently has the dynamic IP address aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd . Then, in principle, all you have to do to log onto your account at home would be to open up a terminal and type

ssh rcjhawk@aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd

where you'd replace rcjhawk by your own account, of course. Then, if you have ssh set up properly, you'll be logged to a CLI on your home machine.

In the usual home setup, with many computers connected to a router with only one external IP address, this will never work out of the box. First, the router doesn't (usually) do ssh on its own, and if it did there wouldn't be any useful information for you there, unless you wanted to trash fix your own network. Second, the router doesn't know which machine you want to talk to. And third, even if it did, that machine might not be accepting ssh requests (and won't, if you've followed my previous recommendation).

So what do we need to do? Let's see: First, we need to tell the router which computer gets the ssh session. Then, we need to set that computer up to receive ssh commands. Finally, if we want to be able to contact multiple computers, all behind the same router, we have to figure out how to do that, as well.

Setting up the router

First things first: how does the router pick a computer for ssh? Well, though Wikipedia tries to explain it in technical detail, basically your computer connections to the outside world are controlled by a set of 65536 (or 2¹⁶) ports. If you like, you can consider each port as a connection in an old-style telephone switchboard. When you call up a specific service on a computer, you ask to be hooked up to a specific phone number.

Some of these phone numbers, or ports, are customarily assigned to specific services. For example, port 80 is usually reserved for a web server. It doesn't have to be that way, though, you could start your web server running on port 31526, if you liked. The problem is that everyone's browser would be looking for your server on port 80 of your computer, and you wouldn't get many hits. (If that's what you desire, go for it.)

ssh, it turns out, is typically assigned port 22. So when I run

ssh rcjhawk@aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd

the computer I'm on asks the operator (my home router), to connect it to port 22 so that it can talk to whoever is there. If that contact speaks ssh, then we can communicate. If, however, the contact is speaking telnet, or ftp, we're going to have problems.

The router, as we said above, knows nothing about ssh, or at least doesn't want to talk to the unwashed masses of the Internet. It has to pass the call on to a computer that I've designated to receive ssh requests. This works by what is known as Port Forwarding. This tells that router that whenever someone comes calling at port 22 it is to pass that signal along to a specific computer.

How do you do port forwarding? Well, that depends on your router, your firewall, if any, and maybe on your modem. I can't give general directions, though PortForward.com might be able to help. There is also a YouTube instructional video, and you ought to be able to find specific instructions for your own router/firewall.

Since I'm on Verizon FIOS here at the house, I have a Verizon MI424WR modem/router. There is an old set of instructions for port forwarding online, but the software seems to have changed. That did provide a starting point, however, and I've figured how how to set up forwarding on my current setup:

1. Point your Browser at http://192.168.1.1/
2. Click Firewall at the top of the page.
3. Click Port Forwarding on the left.
4. You see a line that says Create new port forwarding rule: and below that a box that says IP Address forward to or select from menu. Click on that, and then click on the machine you want to pipe your ssh requests to.
5. Click on the box labeled Application to forward … and select SSH. When things settle down, click apply.

Setting up your home machine

This is fairly straightforward. Let's assume that we've instructed the router to forward port 22 to hal, here. On hal, we've followed all the instructions to get the ssh daemon running, so that we know what to do with incoming ssh requests.

Currently, however, we have the line
ALL: ALL
in our /etc/hosts.deny file, and
ALL: 192.168.1.0/255.255.255.0
in /etc/hosts.allow, which means that only computers on the local network can ssh to hal. One way to fix this would be to add
sshd: ALL
to /etc/hosts.allow. This allows hal to receive ssh requests from any machine, anywhere. Another way to do it would be to specify those external machines that can access hal by host. For example, if I worked for Google, the line might read:
sshd: 72.14.0.0/255.255.0.0
or some-such, letting me log in from any computer with an ip number 72.14.xxx.yyy.

Once we have your home computer's /etc/hosts.allow file properly set up, then running
ssh youraccount@aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd
from an allowed machine, where youraccount is the account name on your home machine, and aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd is your router's current IP address, should get you in, at least after you enter the appropriate password.

Other machines on your network

The problem with all of that is that I can only access hal by this method. Suppose I want to access another computer, fred, instead. I could, of course, get into my router and change port 22 forwarding from hal to fred, but that's difficult to do from the road, unless I allowed my router to be administered remotely.

However, the port/service assignment is more of what you'd call a guideline. We can, in fact, use any port in a storm for ssh services. In the example above the Verizon router had presets for ssh using port 22, but we could have used any other port instead.

Again, the exact way of doing this will vary from router to router, but to set up forwarding of an arbitrary port to a machine with the Verizon router,

1. Point your Browser at http://192.168.1.1/
2. Click Firewall at the top of the page.
3. Click Port Forwarding on the left.
4. Under IP Address … click on your target machine.
5. Under Application click Custom Ports. When things settle down you'll have a bunch of boxes to click.
6. Under Protocol select TCP.
7. Under Source Ports select Any.
8. Under Destination Ports select Specify, and then put in your selected port. In this case we'll use 1022. We don't have to use 1022, but it's simple to remember, once we know that ssh ordinarily uses port 22.
9. Click on Apply and you're done here.

Now go back to your target machine. Open up a terminal window. Then,

1. Run
   sudo vi /etc/hosts.allow
   and edit the file to allow sshd access from your favorite machines, just as you did with the first machine.
2. Run
   sudo vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config
   Look for a line that says Port 22
3. Below that line add the line
   Port 1022
   or whatever other number you've chosen.
4. Stop and restart the ssh daemon by running the command:
   sudo /etc/init.d/ssh restart
5. Now go over to your remote machine. Run
   ssh youraccount@aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd -p 1022
   if 1022 is the port you've chosen. You should be logged on to the second machine in your network.

That concludes the tutorial on accessing your home machines' command lines. Ubuntu also has a remote desktop feature, which I've yet to use. When I get around to trying it out we'll put that online here as well.

Finding Your External IP Address

For various reasons you might want to find your public IP address, that is, the 32-bit number, expressed in pseudo-decimal form as something like 72.14.204.99, that tells the world how to reach your computer.

For most businesses and government offices this is trivial: your computer is assigned a static IP address, one that never changes with time. For home users, though, it's a little more complex.

Start with the IP address itself. The largest possible IP address is 255.255.255.255. That means that you can have no more than 4,294,967,296 unique IP addresses, and some of those are reserved for local use, as we'll see. We're coming up on 7 billion people in the world. Not everyone has a computer (yet, and remember iPhones, iPads, Kindle, and all 'Droids count), but many people have more than one (see iPhones, iPads, …). So there aren't enough IP addresses to go around. Eventually, everyone will switch over to the IPv6 address scheme, which will give us 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 (2¹²⁸, or 3.4×10³⁸) possible addresses, which is probably enough for every non-hydrogen nucleus in the observable universe to have its own address.

But we're not there yet, so something has to be done to shrink the address space. Your local ISP solves this problem by 1) charging you extra to get a static IP address; 2) giving you only one IP address per gateway (your cable, FIOS, DSL, or dial-up modem, or some other router or hub that connects you to the internet); and 3) taking your IP address away from you when you're not using it.

That last one is called dynamic IP addressing, and it's part of what we're going to talk about today. If you have a dynamic IP address, then when you turn your gateway connection (usually some type of modem or router) on, your ISP assigns you an IP address from its bank of addresses. As long as your connection is turned on, you'll have an IP address, but your ISP can change it at any time. It will almost certainly change it if you turn off your connection and turn it on again. So if you know your IP address right now, there's no reason to expect it will be the same tomorrow, or even five minutes from now — though to be fair, Verizon FIOS has kept our house on the same IP address for weeks.

And there is worse to come: Suppose your ISP has given you the address 244.117.16.25. The computer you're reading this on doesn't have a clue as to what that address is. Go back to 2), above. Your house has only one IP address, and it belongs to your gateway. Every other computer in the house belongs to your home network. When you want to download your email, your computer politely requests the gateway to go fetch it:

Please, sir, may I have my email?

Oh, all right. Just this once. But don't tell any of the other computers what we're doing.

Thank you, sir! I'll be eternally grateful

You'd better be, or no Internet for you.

Let's see how this works. ping is a command that will poke a stick at a computer and get information about it. Let's try it with a well known site:

ping google.com
PING google.com (72.14.204.99) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from iad04s01-in-f99.1e100.net (72.14.204.99): icmp_seq=1 ttl=53 time=21.8 ms
64 bytes from iad04s01-in-f99.1e100.net (72.14.204.99): icmp_seq=2 ttl=53 time=20.2 ms
64 bytes from iad04s01-in-f99.1e100.net (72.14.204.99): icmp_seq=3 ttl=53 time=23.4 ms
^C

(you'll need to hit ctrl-C to stop this)

So we see that google.com has an IP address of 72.14.204.99 — that's actually one of many, but don't worry about that. Now let's try it with a local machine:

ping george
PING george.home (192.168.1.2) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from george.home (192.168.1.2): icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=9.77 ms
64 bytes from george.home (192.168.1.2): icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=2.70 ms
64 bytes from george.home (192.168.1.2): icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.961 ms
^C

So far has the home network is concerned, george lives at 192.168.1.2, which is one of those reserved addresses we mentioned above. The range 192.168.0.0 to 192.168.255.255 is reserved for internal networks. As we read this, there are no doubt hundreds of thousands of computers with the local IP address of 192.168.1.2. Every one of them, however, has a different public IP address.

Great. But sometimes I need to know my external IP address, and it's apparent that Hal, here, hasn't got a clue as to what it is. How can I find it?

The easiest way is to go to another website. Every website you connect with gets your public IP address automatically, unless you use some kind of anonymous service. Some websites are set up to tell you what your IP address is. One example is What Is My IP?. They even provide a way to get your IP address with a simple one-line terminal command:

wget www.whatismyip.com/automation/n09230945.asp -O - -q ; echo

If you read your Gmail via Thunderbird, Evolution, Outlook, etc., and keep your web client on all day, gmail will tell you the address of your computer. Just log on to your gmail account and look for the line that says Last account activity: …. The IP address there is the last computer to download email. If you're using more than one computer from different locations, say you left your office machine on over the weekend and now you're using a home computer, click on the Details link and you'll find all of the activity for this account.

There's a company DynDNS, which will not only find your IP address, but give you a domain name that constantly updates to your current numerical address. Of course, they do this by having your computer constantly tell them the public IP address.

And, of course, your gateway knows its public IP address. Just log onto it through your browser (something like http://192.168.0.1, http://192.168.1.1, or http://192.168.100.1, depending on your system), and your IP address will be up there someplace.

But all of these systems have flaws: Say you need your IP address in a script. You can get it via your browser from your gmail or your gateway machine, but it's hard to parse a browser page inside a script. The What's My IP? one-liner works in a script, but what if their site goes down, or, worse, they go out of business? Same for DynDNS. We want a solution that works any time your gateway is on and your computer has an internet connect, and we want to get it from the command line.

Any other way just ain't elegant.

If you search the Internet you find surprisingly few ways (i.e., none) to do this. Partly I think it's because there isn't a consistent way to find your gateway from your current machine. For example, in the days when we used Comcast, we had a cable modem as the gateway. On the house side of the modem we connected a Linksys router, which was the hub of our home network. All the computers in the house were connected through the router to the modem — a two step-process. Now we have Verizon FIOS, with a Actiontec MI424WR router that serves as gateway/modem and router — a one-step process.

By stumbling around, and with a little help from nixCraft, I was able to come up with a solution that works for me. It's a bash script. Let me put it here (finally, I hear you say), and we'll dissect it below:

#! /bin/bash

# Determine the public IP address for your DHCP system by bootstrapping

#  calls to your gateway/router

# Requires "route," available in Ubuntu package net-tools, and
# nslookup, available in Ubuntu package dnstools

# Disclaimers:
# 1) This works with Verizon FIOS using the Actiontec MI424WR Router
#    If you have another system YMMV.
#
# 2) And, as you'll no doubt note, this is set up for a Debian system,
#    specifically Ubuntu 10.04 .  Package names and installation
#    procedures for other systems WILL vary.
#

###
# Start Here:
###

#
# Get Router internal Gateway IP
# Information found on
# http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/how-to-find-gateway-ip-address/
# If route is not installed, run
# sudo apt-get install net-tools
# and make sure /sbin is in your $PATH
# Note "U" = up, and "G" = gateway

internalip=`route -n | grep UG | awk '{print $2}'`

echo Your Gateway\'s Internal IP Address is: $internalip

# Now we need to get the name of the router.  If you don't
#  have nslookup installed, run
# sudo apt-get install dnsutils

echo -n "Your Gateways's name is: "

routername=`nslookup $internalip | grep "name =" | awk '{print $4}'`

# On the Actiontec, at least, the name has an annoying "." at the end.
# Remove it:

routername=${routername%\.}

echo $routername

echo -n "Your Public IP Address is: "

nslookup $routername | grep Address | tail -1 | awk '{print $2}'

OK, what's going on? First of all script only works if you have the route and nslookup commands installed on your system. If they aren't there, in Ubuntu, and presumably and Debian system, you can install them using

sudo apt-get install net-tools dnsutils

The first call, route -n, will look at the Kernel's IP routing table:

$ route -n
Kernel IP routing table
Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags Metric Ref    Use Iface
192.168.1.0     0.0.0.0         255.255.255.0   U     1      0        0 eth0
169.254.0.0     0.0.0.0         255.255.0.0     U     1000   0        0 eth0
0.0.0.0         192.168.1.1     0.0.0.0         UG    0      0        0 eth0

which on this machine tells us that we have several local connections. The U under Flags means that the connection is up, and G means it's the gateway. From this we see that the numerical address of the gateway is 192.168.1.1. Let's see what nslookup can tell us about that. Note that the script has to parse all of the output to get this far.

$ nslookup 192.168.1.1
Server:  192.168.1.1
Address: 192.168.1.1#53

1.1.168.192.in-addr.arpa name = Wireless_Broadband_Router.home.

Here's something new, our gateway's got a name. Wireless_Broadband_Router.home. Again, the script has to do a little work to tease that name out of nslookup's output, but we'll just do it by hand here:

$ nslookup Wireless_Broadband_Router.home
Server:  192.168.1.1
Address: 192.168.1.1#53

Name: Wireless_Broadband_Router.home
Address: 192.168.1.1
Name: Wireless_Broadband_Router.home
Address: xxx.yyy.zzz.aaa

The first address, 192.168.1.1, is just the router's internal IP address. The last address (Of course I'm not giving you my IP address. I'm not daft, you know.) is the one we want. xxx.yyy.zzz.aaa is the external address of this machine.

Of course there are many, many, problems with this script.

• So far it only works with the Verzion/Actiontec setup. A friend, running Ubuntu, wasn't able to pick out his gateway machine with the route -n command.
• Some machines can have multiple gateways.
• The Mac's route command doesn't work in the same way as under Linux, so you can't parse out the gateway, even if you have none.
• You might be able to tease the gateway IP address out of the /etc/resolv.conf file. I don't know what happens if you have multiple gateways here. Under Ubuntu, the one numerical gateway is 192.168.1.1, on the Apple it gives me 192.168.1.1 and xxx.yyy.zzz.aaa, my public IP address.

If you try the script, leave a comment below. Let me know your internet setup (gateway/router), if it works, and any tweaks you did to make it work. Maybe we can come up with a universal script.

Now, by all that's geekly, why did we do all of this? That's the subject of an upcoming post, boys and girls …

A Year of FIOS

Well, in the language of a current TV show, we've been using FIOS for One year, nine days, and forty-six minutes, so it's time for our first annual performance review:

• It works. Internet, Television, Telephone, all work.

• The system has no trouble with Linux machines. The tech who installed the router had to use a Windows machine to initialize it, but I think that was more of a tech ability issue than an absolute requirement. I can certainly log into the router via the web interface from either of the Linux boxes, as well as the Macs and the windows machines. I think I've noted that the router won't let you listen to streaming RealPlayer output with a program other than RealPlayer, but that's a minor issue and I could probably call tech support to see how to set the router firewall permissions appropriately. Everything else works fine.
• We haven't used the telephone that much, frankly. My wife prefers the sound on the copper-wire line we kept, and since I'm not here that much this year we don't often use the FIOS line. I don't notice any difference in sound quality, but you should know that I just found out that a Sonic Screwdriver makes a sound that I can't hear, but everyone else can.
• TV reception is excellent. There haven't been a lot of the pixellation issues that we had with Comcast digital. The only thing better about Comcast was that they included Starz, Encore, etc., in the standard package. FIOS doesn't, but if you buy the Showtime package, you get all of that as well. (HBO is a separate package, alas.)
• When FIOS switched to an all digital TV signal last summer, they sent me a free convert box that allows me to access all of the TV channels on my second TV. It doesn't have any fancy features, but it accesses all the FIOS channels.
• All in all, the quality of service is slightly ahead of Comcast's. However, that has a lot to do with the quality of the connection between the street and the house, and Comcast was using an old cable. If we ever switch back to Comcast, they will hopefully install a newer, high-speed, connection.

So all in all, a positive experience. Knowing what I know now, would I sign up with FIOS again? Yes, absolutely. Next December our two-year commitment to FIOS ends. Will we keep it? It depends on the package Comcast has to offer.

30 Dec 2008: Things I forgot to add the first time:

• Verizon gives you a measly 10 MB of personal web space, last I looked. I think Comcast gave you about 250 MB. So I had to move my personal web pages to a freebie website provider. Well, it was free except that I had to register my domain with them. Since that only costs $7/year, it's not a problem. But if you have a significant amount of junk content in your current ISP's personal web space, it won't fit into FIOS.
• The DVR box that we rent from FIOS comes with some nifty widgets, allowing you to view weather, traffic, news, and sports results, along with community information, of which we've had none.

31 Dec 2008: Just one more thing: The FIOS tech can initialize your system without Windows. Just look at the last paragraph of this link. Wish I had known that last year. Oh, well, that was a long time ago, in (almost) another administration, and anyway, that Windows installation is dead.

Obsfucating email

One of the annoying things about some jobs is that random people need to be able to email you, meaning that your email needs to be out on the web — No, not me, but you'll note I have my email address on the sidebar anyway.

This almost automatically generates a lot of spam, as harvester programs search your HTML source and look for the mailto: links.

There are ways to hide email addresses from programs, as a look at the source code for this page will show. Depending on how secure you want to try to be, I've found three levels code that might help reduce spam to your email address. Of course, it doesn't protect you from spam generated because a virus or spyware code got your email from someone's address book, but it should help keep the spam down a bit. Note that all require Javascript:

• Simple (From Tim Williams)
• Better (Also from Tim Williams)
• Still Better (Andrew Moulden's modification of the above code

Note that I've not labeled any of these best, and I don't claim they will work against every possible harvester, but it should help. You'll probably also be better off starting with a brand-new email address. And, of course, making sure that everyone who puts your email in his address book uses Linux.

A Programmable Audio Recorder

You might remember that I like to listen to A Prairie Home Companion at the gym. That link shows you how to take the Real Audio stream from the PHC Archive and turn it into an mp3 or ogg file.

And that works, everywhere except with Verizon FIOS, which for some reason only lets streams in RTSP be played by a real RealPlayer client. Probably a firewall issue. I've tried tracking it down, but haven't gotten up the energy to try to talk my way up the FIOS help staff to find someone who would tell me how to fix it.

But, as someone once said, “there's more than one way to do it.” For example, I could use Realplayer to play the file through the speakers, and then record the output either by invoking SoX as rec, using gnome-sound-recorder, or using Audacity (which I can't get to work in this mode). Any of these methods, of course, ties up the speakers for two hours, not very desirable.

Alternatively, one could stumble upon the fact that Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) plays as an http (port 80) continuous stream on the web, that Prairie Home Companion airs for two hours starting at 5pm Central Time (6pm Eastern) every Saturday Night, and that FIOS allows mplayer to listen to that stream. Oh, and that MPR puts on a 15-20 second advertisement when you start the download.

With that information, we construct this little script, which you should save in a directory that the /bin/sh shell can find. We'll call it mpr_record, and we thank Penguin Pete for the hint on how to put all of this in a box:

#! /bin/bash

# Get to the correct directory

cd $HOME/audio/podcasts/prairie_home_companion

# get year month date

year=`date +%y`
month=`date +%m`
day=`date +%d`

# Print out what we want to do:

echo Recording to phc_$year$month$day.flac

# Record for 122 minutes:  One minute before the official start,
# and one minute after the official end, just in case our clocks
# are off, and to account for the initial MPR ad.

# You don't have to use the flac format,
# Using .wav will end up giving you a smaller .mp3 file
# with a loss of quality that won't show up at the gym.

# You might not need the two-step process, just save directly
# to .mp3 or .ogg, but my notes say this isn't very efficient
# in terms of final file size.

# The 1> /dev/null makes sure all of the streaming information that
# mplayer continuously spits out doesn't make it into the final
# output.

# http://www.prairiehome.org/play/128.pls is linked to the MPR stream.

mplayer -endpos 2:02:00 -vc null -vo null -ao pcm:fast -ao pcm:file=phc_$year$month$day.flac http://www.prairiehome.org/play/128.pls 1> /dev/null

# Convert to mp3
# ogg produces a smaller file, but my player doesn't do ogg.

echo Converting to phc_$year$month$day.mp3

# Note that SoX must be recompiled to support MP3s, if that's
# what you want here.  Actually, that link doesn't work on Ubuntu,
# I had to recompile from source.  Someday I'll write that up.

sox phc_$year$month$day.flac phc_$year$month$day.mp3

# Of course, ffmpeg would work just as well:

# ffmpeg -i phc_$year$month$day.wav phc_$year$month$day.mp3

# Edit id3 info.  This adds both id3v1 and id3v2 data.
# My labeling scheme is designed to overcome the limits of my
# player.  You might want to label yours differently.  See
# 'man id3v2' for all the options.

echo Labeling phc_$year$month$day.mp3

id3v2 -t $year$month$day -g 100 -y 20$year -A NPR -a "Prairie Home Companion" -T 1 phc_$year$month$day.mp3

So, if you've read all the comments, you'll see that this records from MPR for two hours and two minutes. Now we just need to make sure this starts one minute before 6pm (Eastern US), every Saturday. If you've been following along this blog, you know this is a job for cron. The crontab entry we need is

59 17 * * 6 mpr_record > $HOME/audio/podcasts/prairie_home_companion/mpr.errors 2>&1

which starts the recording at 17:59 (5:59pm) local time (Eastern, here), on the sixth day of the week, running the program mpr_record and putting all of its output into an error file, just in case we need to track things down.

Of course, what we've done is turned the machine into the Internet Audio version of a programmable VCR. This can be used for any regularly scheduled broadcast the mplayer can play.

I, For One, Welcome Our New Telecom Overlords

I'm filled with wonder, hope, excitement, fear, and dread.

Yes, my children, we're changing our broadband, cable, and ½ of our phone service from Comcast (broadband & cable) and Verizon (phone) to Verizon FIOS.

Specifically, we're getting the Verizon package for all three services, which is supposed to cost $99/month, but actually costs about $135/month when you factor in the DVR, and the movie package (we chose HBO) that they require you get in order to get the installation charges dropped. That's about what we pay now for Comcast's cable and broadband service, and it allows us to drop a copper phone line.

Of course, Comcast has its own “Triple Play” which costs about the same. However, that all goes through the same coax that provides our service now, and which is sometimes inadequate (it was first laid over 20 years ago, what do you expect?). And friends have Verizon's FIOS phone and broadband, which seems to be decent. No one I know has the TV yet, as far as I know. We're pioneers. Hence my dread.

But we get this really neat $200, 19 inch high def TV, which I plan to mount right by my computer, so that I never have to leave this chair — OK, maybe to go to work, but otherwise. (Or we can get a $200 Best Buy gift card, for a down payment on a really big HDTV.)

Anyway, installation is scheduled for Wednesday next week, so I'll let you know how it goes.

Such as today: Last Friday Miss Utility came out and painted orange paint on the snow in our yard, along with flags marking various cables. Today, the line-digging crew came out and installed the fiber from the street to the house.

Along the way they cut the Comcast cable — unfortunate, as we're still using the cable until Wednesday next. They did manage to repair that.

The Verizon-owned copper phone line, however, they shredded.

This does not comfort me.

I'm sure it was unintentional, as we told them that we wanted to keep one of our copper phone lines, because we've had many power problems in the past. True, the FIOS box comes with an 8-hour telephone battery, but there have been times when I'm sure we would have run through that. Hence we want to keep the copper.

Verizon is supposed to come back tomorrow and replace the copper. If the don't cut anything else I'll report later in the week.

Oh, yeah, the deal's for two years. We'll see what kind of offer Comcast has then.