hookup to cable modem was easy

All I can say is wow! I have never used DHCP before or tried to setup a *nix system with a DHCP connection. It was much easier than I expected, no wonder there are hardly any how-to's for specific connections. I dropped a netgear FA-310TX 10/100MB card into one of my PCI slots. Setup tulip drivers for kernel and setup the new image. Hooked up the cable modem, ran ifconfig and answered 3 questions:

1) dynamic for the IP address
2) host_name = whatever you want (I think this was the question)
3) domain_name = cox.net

rebooted the system and bam.... I was online. I am a little concerned about security cause I guess I have a static IP now or at least the cable modem has a static IP. I set hosts.deny to not allow any outside connections (to ports?), outside of AIM, nntp, e-mail, www, and ftp I don't do much else. and with AIM I have a set list of people that I correspond with and that is it. Should I setup iptables for a little more insurance? I don't have anything really confidential or needing security, all my work now is with genetic algorithms and neural nets which I backup periodically. My main security concern is someone just maliciously or even just a curiosity seeker getting user access or rooting the system and screwing it up in the process because I am lazy and don't want to reconfigure my system from scratch. I have been watching my logs, using netstat, and using other basic security measures and haven't seen any malicious activity that I notice but as I said before I am no network security guru. Hell I am not even a network guru.

Also when I want to SU to drop something say in /usr/local/bin or to do system maintenance can I kill and restart dhcpd or do I have to reboot when I restart dhcpd.

side note - I love my broadband connection, I don't think I could ever do dialup again. But Cox's Customer Service dept leaves a lot to be desired, I was without a broadband connection for 6 mos due to a installation error, I called them twice about it but couldn't get service calls in a time frame where I was available to sit and wait. When I finally got a tech out he told me the problem wasn't my end but theirs so I went to customer service for credit since Cox screwed up the initial install for high speed internet (I guess they call it HSD for short.) The first person I spoke with was polite and said she would send the issue to their escalation dept since the credit was more than she could handle. I guess their escalation dept refused the credit saying that the installation problem was my fault (probably because I use linux and not winblows) even though their tech answered explicitly that the failure of the modem to sync signal was their fault at install. Yesterday I spent 5 hours talking to ditzy reps who would keep telling me they didn't understand what I was talking about with power measurements and stuff like that. Cox's Reply was "Our escalation dept. researched this issue and deemed the outage to be your fault not ours." When I tried to pin down how the research was done no one could answer that, I asked if the tech that determined my HSD outage to be due to faulty installed had been contacted and Cox's reply was "no." I had them read all the notes on my acct from day 1 and they don't even keep good notes as to what a problem is. I asked one cust. service rep to put down verbatim what I was told with respect to power measurements on the line but she refused to reopen the case. So I went down to their office in chandler, they were no help at all and just told me I had to deal with customer service on the phone. So I called customer service back and spoke with a rep who said that we had to have a 2 way conversation... Funny cause I had three 1 way conversations already with Cox, she got her supervisor who read the notes to me from that day, that is when I found out that the first rep I spoke with who said she put down what I said verbatim about power levels lied and hadn't entered those notes. Supposedly this supervisor took down what I said and sent the case back to escalation (which they will probably refuse me credit again.) -- end rant

Just thought that my experience will help others decide yay or nay to do business with Cox. From what I hear though Qwest is worse.

Craig S.