Making DOCSIS config files under Debian (8)

This is a really quick brain dump so I remember what I’ve had to do to make this work. This is to get DOCSIS files to work with an Arris CMTS100 and old NTL (ambit) 250 modem.

There is a free windows app here to do this but I just got errors from the CMTS from it. This may be my fault or something else but the Linux DOCSIS program seems to be much more consistent, it’s not tried to abstract everything too much and allows finer grained control and decoding of the DOCSIS files.

You’ll need to grab the source from here which includes a link to example files. You’ll need all the usual development packages, GCC, Make etc. You will also need to download and compile net-snmp from here. I also had to make a symlin to my libperl.so on the dev box (ln -s libperl.so.5.20 libperl.so) to get net-snmp to compile. The instructions for doing this are here. You will also need to make sure you have Bison available. You will need libsnmp-dev and flex, neither of which the configure script will tell you are missing if you try to run it. If you are good at this point you can unpack the source and do a ./configure and all will be good. So in my bare Debian 8 dev box…

apt-get install gcc make flex bison libsnmp-dev -y
./configure
make all
make install

You should now be able to type “docsis” and get help.

In use we have a text file that has our config and another with our key for the CMTS….

docsis docsis.txt key.txt docsis.md5