Originally posted Nov. 28, 2009.

My sister Julie finally got Comcast cable service at her house. I bought a SurfBoard SB6120 cable modem for her to use. I specifically got that one because it was on Comcast’s list of approved cable modems and I didn’t want to hear that she had to rent a modem from them because the one we had wouldn’t work. (Let me just say right off the bat, that I neither like nor trust Comcast.) We got the modem hooked up to her iMac and everything worked fine. Now I wanted to get wireless service for her working. I bought an Airport Extreme and tried hooking that up. Everything was connected and configured properly, but the airport would not get an ip address from the cable modem. I tried cycling power, turning everything off for 15 minutes (I timed it) and nothing worked. I figured that the mac address of the iMac had to be stored somewhere in the cable modem, but I couldn’t figure out how to reset it. Since Julie was out of town, I just unplugged everything for the night. Upon returning the next day, I plugged everything back in. It didn’t work right away, but after 15 minutes or so, the light on the airport extreme turned green and everything worked as it should.