Pain of DSL

I've just moved to my parents' place and setup my DSL connection today. What a pain! I thought I could just hook up my vonage box and wifi router to the DSL modem and be up and running.

No, I had to create account with AT&T SBC Yahoo first and then make that user/password permanent on the DSL modem [I found the hints in some news group and the PDF manual I found by googling the modem model name and number: with that I was able to directly connect to the modem via web interface and make the modem login at power up time]. The most frustrating was when I can connect directly from my notebook to DSL modem without any problem but when I connected via the router, it won't resolve the domain names. After every power off/on tries (except maybe once), it would never let me go to web pages or ping known sites. I tried spoofing MAC address, changed the IP address ranges of the router, I tried mixing and matching my Vonage box and router differently but nothing seemed to matter.

When I put in the DNS server numbers (2 of them) into the router, things seemed to work finally!