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…
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.