With those six simple words I started a journey into darkness and despair that lasted two days.
I was at home last week to spend some time bonding with squeaker ( see “Squeaker in Da House” and “It’s a boy….” ) and helping Viv cope with “the boys”.
I had taken a netgear box home to test our wireless product and noticed that it seemed to have lost wireless connectivity on Monday, I tried power cycling the netgear but it refused to connect to the wireless network.
Hmmm I said to myself, the firmware on my ADSL modem/router/access point is quite old, I wonder if there is an update?? As it turns out, YES there was, I applied it and everything look fine except that I could no longer connect to the internet!!!!
Bugger, now what do I do?? I didn’t have the previous firmware as the router came with it, and no way to get to the internet.
I tried everything I could think of, even tried downloading the firmware onto my mobile phone…. No luck.
In the end I hijacked my mothers dialup account using my iMacs internal modem, I downloaded all the firmware versions I could find and tried every one of them….. No luck.
My ISP Exetel, who am I very happy with in general, have no after hours support so I couldn’t ask them to check it for me, in the end I gave up, set the ADSL modem into “Bridge Mode” and setup a dedicated firewall machine to do the firewall/NAT functionality that my modem seems to have forgotten how to do.
I’m now running IPCop and all seems well so far. I have at least as much ( if not more ) functionality with this setup in terms of firewall/NAT, unfortunately I have lost my wireless access point as it doesn’t work in bridge mode.
I could try and debug this with Netcomm and Exetel, BUT I’m never at home during business hours and I can live without the wireless for now at least.
So, boys and girls, sometimes updating firmware when you don’t need to can be bad…
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That’s harsh. You know, if something ain’t broken, don’t fix it. However, the lure of a new firmware is very strong, much like the Dark Side. I recently upgraded the firmware on my Denon DVD player, even though some have literally fried their players with the unoffical multi-region version. Heck, even though I haven’t an amp which can take a digital DVD-Audio or SACD signal I still *needed* to upgrade my Denon to be able to send SACD (DSD) over its Denonlink output (given Sony and Philips recent “okay” to endless pleas by the ever bleeding-edge Denon). Well, it all worked, but I *could* have fucked it. People like us will always want the latest firmware, even when ours works fine. Take also the example of the Toppy – the latest firmware is actually a step backwards, with dual-recording bugs aplenty. I’ve now rolled back to my previous firmware (which I still had), and it’s back to being as good as gold. As the old man from “Pet Sematary” says – “sometimes, dead is better.” Why that’s relevant I don’t know, it just sounds good.