So SBC decided to switch me back to a $29.99 plan for DSL after a year of service was completed with them. I've hated SBC ever since I started with them, seeing how it took me TWO WEEKS of calling their tech support EVERY DAY before they were able to get my line up (they kept sending their line technicians out when I was home, without notifying me -- I'd have to spend two days convincing them I needed a technician, and then they'd randomly send one out again without confirming a date, or cancel open tickets I had with them. When it was all over, I asked them to reimburse me for the hours -- literally, hours -- I had spent trying to get everything setup. They told me they could only credit me for the two weeks of service I had not received.). Anyways, I was HAPPY that my contract was up, and I could switch to DSLExtreme, about which I've only heard good things, and who has a VERY responsive online support channel. i haven't had to pick up the phone to talk to them, and their techs generally know what they are talking about. Two good things, and a third: they said they could transfer service transparently in as little as two hours (and as long as two days).

The transfer was not seamless, however. My 'activation date' was set for Thursday, and my internet went off Tues at 5. I talked to a tech online, and he said it looked like SBC hadn't put it through yet -- I told him I had a blinking green internet light on my Speedstream 5100 modem, and asked him if I had to change the settings. He said I would have to turn PPoE off, but that the sync wouldn't be affected by bad settings -- IE, I needed to wait for the sync to come in.

Well, maybe the sync was bad, maybe it wasn't -- I had a solid DSL light (which I didn't mention) so I can't be sure of that.

Came home wednesday, blinking green light. No internet.

Came home thurs, the 'activation' date. blinking green light. No internet.

Well, after an unpleasant evening of working online via my cellphone on wed, I decided I was going to double-check the modem settings. I plugged my laptop into the modem, tapped in the 'modem access code' and was able to switch to 'Bridged Mode' (the only non-PPoE setting, which I assumed was what I wanted). BAM! Internet on my laptop. It's very possible that I would've had internet on my laptop two days ago if I flipped it, but nonetheless, at least I wasn't looking at two weeks of fighting with SBC.

I unplugged my laptop, plugged in my router, restarted it. No internet.

Wha?

It was set to DHCP, which I assumed should get it going right away, since I was supposedly getting dynamic IPs from DSLEXTREME. But nothing.

That's when I did something very stupid.

I set DDWRT to use a Static IP interface, and assigned that static ip (WAN, but I wasn't thinking of that) 192.168.1.1. Which just happened to be the LAN IP for the DDWRT. And, apparently, the LAN failsafe for the DDWRT.

Basically, this meant that as soon as my router rebooted, the web config went bye-bye.

Why? Well, as I eventually found out once I managed to login via telnet, the HTTPD server was unable to bind to the LAN IP 192.168.1.1 for the rather obvious reason that the WAN IP was already set to 192.168.1.1. I guessed that resetting it would fix my problems, but figuring out how to do so was difficult, particularly since my favorite trick of "grep -R"-ing for relevant strings didn't work (no -r for the command line grep -- not that it would've helped me anyways).

It took ME a frustrating hour of listing config files and looking at the DDWRT wiki (thank god I could still get internet straight from the teat) to figure out the following command sequence was necessary to reset my WAN ip from the command line:

nvram set wan_ipaddr="0.0.0.0"
nvram commit

After tapping that in and rebooting the router, I could get back to the web config, but still couldn't coax any internet out of the box. Another hour later and some random "dslextreme bridged modem" googling, I figured out it was necessary to select "Add IP" from my DSL account settings page in order to allocate another dynamic IP for my router, since my greedy laptop had gobbled up the first one when I jacked into the modem.

I don't understand the technical reasons for making you "REQUEST" the additional IP (i imagine it's to minimize load), but the practical result is a lot of confusion on the user side. DSLExtreme could go a long way towards helping out end-users by putting that in bold red type somewhere "IF YOU'RE HOOKING UP A ROUTER YOU WILL PROBABLY NEED TO ADD AN IP". Maybe they did and I didn't see it, maybe they didn't. Either way, I still think fondly of them, because the solution MADE sense (in a weird sort of way), and I was able to troubleshoot it myself. If I had to spend that hour talking to one of SBC's (admittedly, very nice, although not always the most helpful) support reps I probably would've punched a hole in the wall.

anyways, hope this helps someone else, so my time wasn't wasted.