BT Home Hub

BT Home Hub

Oh great! A new hub sold by an organisation that won't support it. If you're following me then here's some hints. (If you ring them, or e-mail them, they claim that they know nothing about the internet protocol services such as mail, or http, or now it seems the configuration of their hub.)

Hub Private Address

This is configurable. So if the default disagrees with your current switch/router/hub/gateway, you can change it. This is probably best done before you connect the second device.

DHCP

This defaults to nearly all. I needed to bring my legacy rules forward and so initially constrained the pool in size, but I discovered that the BT hub permits the fixing of an address to a specific DHCP client which it recognises using the MAC address. The "Devices" panel has the switches. It seems much happier doing this than co-operating with statically addressed systems so I have configured my windows servers as dynamically addressed with a fixed address. See also How to implement dhcp fixed addresses using BT Home Hub and Windows XP and this seems to work. Before converting the Dell server, I had noticed that the hub manager did not recognise the Dell server on the network as connected. It had a static address outside the dhcp pool.

SSID

I have changed the name to have no meaning.

Port Forwarding

I had a problem with this which proved to be about the Gateway/DNS settings of the service host. See the 1st comment below. I wonder how diablo will work, although they have a canned rule AFAIK.

Helpful Links

• BT Broadband Self Help start
• BT's Help Forum, a community self help forum hosted in the bt.com domain.
• Frequency Cast's page, ith audio/video support, but mainly repeats the manual.They also have a page called Home Hub FAQ which also has an item about using additional or 3rd party hubs.
• filesaveas homehub forum, linked to the Frequency Cast.
• Jarviser's Home Hub is an awesome compendium, with great advise.
• A forum thread on configuring port forwarding for utorrent