It is much more important to know what sort of patient has a disease than what sort of disease a patient has - Sir William Osler
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Qwest's DSL turkey gobbles up your brain
Way back in the dark days, almost a year ago, Qwest, the local phone monopoly wannabe decided to replace the DSL modems with a 'better' one. The Cisco 675/678 modems were all the rage at the time and they performed admirably. Sure they had quirks, like Code Red vulnerabilities, and a simple, effective command line interface, but they worked. At worst, you would need to power cycle them every few months. Life was good. Not singing elves good, but more occasional rainbow good. Cisco, for all the scorn they get, makes solid products. They also make expensive products.
Qwest, in their wisdom, probably found they could save a buck or 12 per unit by going with a non-Cisco modem, and they probably were right. It is hard to blame them, they probably anticipated the upcoming expense of lots of lawyers and suitcases brimming with cash to buy their way out of the current legal misunderstandings. Good planning on their part. The only snag is what they replaced the vaunted 678 with, the Actiontec 1520.
Opening the box with a flourish, I am a geek, and this is a cool looking (note: I said looking, and at first it is!) new toy. It theoretically has features that make the Cisco look like an overpriced black clam. Wow, a 4-port hub, an option for wireless, guided HTML setup! Could I ask for anything more? Well yes, but more on that later. As usual, I skipped over the documentation, and pulled the hardware out of the box. Other than being extremely light, it was cool looking, everything was well labeled, and it had the cool swoopy decoration that will look horribly dated in about 3 years. So far so good. A few minutes later, when I got around to looking at the documentation, the downhill slide started.
The documentation, or at least the flimsy packets of things telling you nothing much other than step-by-step instructions on configuring the most common setup, was in nice little plastic baggies with big color coded numbers on them. A monkey could have followed the instructions, starting with the ‘open me first' packet with a big bright number 1 on it. Numbers 2, 3 and 4 were conveniently placed in order beneath them. The problem was that the settings listed in the monkey-proof documentation were not what we needed. This is a corporate setting with static IPs, and a real firewall behind it, DHCP is of no use, NAT will only make things worse, and the ‘security' settings are pointless to begin with. Should be simple enough to turn off, after all, there is a thoughtful setup procedure somewhere in the box for the second most common setting, right? Even if it is not color coded, brightly, the web based setup should make setting it the way I want it to a snap. No problem.
Problem. There was no documentation other than the 'press this when you see this moron' docs. A quick call to Qwest confirmed that we were not missing a manual. This was not heartening. Ok, I lied, the phone call to Qwest wasn't quick; they never are. It was long, and painful, not helped by the staticy recording that told me how sorry they were not to be able to field my call right away. 30 decibels quieter and they might have convinced me that they cared. No manual, and the 'help' files on the CD really were misnamed.
A quick call to the ISP, who, due to a quirk of the regulatory system, was not Qwest, confirmed my deepest fears. When techs talk to techs, and they realize they don't have to use little words, spoken slowly, to get a point across, you can get to the heart of the matter. The ISP quickly told me what was wrong: the modem simply sucks, and this is from a person who deals with them day in and day out. The bright people at Actiontec dumbed down the configuration enough so the average bored housewife could almost set it up, but, according to the ISP, usually failed anyway. They also changed enough of the terminology to make it obtuse to someone who actually did know what they are doing. Having written an entire TCP/IP stack, I put myself in the latter category. Needless to say, since this product was new, neither of us had a clue as to how to set it up, and there was no real documentation. At $135/hr, clients love situations like this. Cisco modems suddenly seem like a bargain.
After about two hours of settings tweaks, we finally got it working. Why it worked, I'll never know, but it was running, and I was, well, still not happy. The client I was setting this up for didn't want me dead after many profuse apologies, so I chalked it up to a good day and went home. They were up, and had a faster and cheaper net connection, mission accomplished.
Fast forward a year or so. Qwest nicely mailed out a postcard telling us to upgrade the firmware on the Actiontec due to security vulnerabilities on the router. I applaud them for being proactive after the debacle that was their response to Code Red, but surely there is a better way in this world of Internet connectivity than printing out and mailing postcards. Maybe I should offer to set them up with mailing list technology, it would have saved at least a week, and cost them thousands of dollars less. Ah well, this is Qwest, a company that, to anyone that deals with them, obviously does not have the slightest clue about the net.
Being the good little boy I am, I went to the web page that was listed on the card, and after a 404, and a brief hunt for where the page was now, found the instructions. Like the modem itself, they were step-by-step, Dick and Jane style, monkey-proof instructions. Of course, they don't work if you happen to have a real firewall, but hey, that is easy to deal with if you have a clue. 10 minutes of configuration later, I was logged into the modem.
Looking back, there were warning signs all over the place. Chief among them was a plea to download the Actiontec 1520 recovery software. This happy program recovers botched bios upgrades, and according to the Qwest technician, does so effectively. While you might commend Actiontec for providing such a graceful way to recover from things gone horribly wrong, the mere fact that it has to exist is troublesome. Cisco doesn't have one. The Qwest tech also confirmed that the recovery software is needed a lot, but he can't remember ever having to do the same to a Cisco 678. I guess I didn't have the pleasure of talking to him during my more 'experimental' days of network setup. You can kill a Cisco, it is just a trick to get there. While I didn't have the pleasure, I have been told by multiple sources that the Actiontec modems are far less of a trick in this regard.
The thing that got me to call Qwest in the first place was a dialog box that was not in the monkey-proof upgrade page. It simply stated that the setup program detected that my modem was not set to 192.168.0.1, and it was not in DHCP mode. It asked me politely to revert my modem to these settings before I upgraded. This ‘recommended' ‘choice' was to prevent possible settings loss. Due to the 3rd world detention center experience of the first setup, I decided to check exactly what they meant by this. Qwest has gotten much better in the last year, the hold time has decreased by almost 50 minutes during off-peak periods. They still haven't gotten the hang of turning down the recorded messages to less painful volumes though. 1 out of 2 isn't a bad record if you are a telco.
The Qwest tech was actually quite helpful. He didn't make me prove the 'I know what I am doing, can we skip the power cycle' comments, we just quickly got down to work. I read him the dialog box, and asked if this meant I was about to lose my hard won configuration. 'I'm not sure' he said. I politely asked him to find out for sure, and after a few minutes on hold, he came back and said to the best of his knowledge, it was a 50-50 shot of me coming out of this with a non-default modem. He was off by about 50, give or take none.
Before I pressed the 'now you are not going home at a reasonable hour' dialog box, I asked him to stick around because we were in for hours of fun if the upgrade did what I thought it would do. Needless to say, the 'warning' message about what the firmware upgrade 'might' do was most likely a cover. From everything I am able to gather, the upgrade blasts all configurations out, and leaves you with a default modem. Joy.
There is a happy ending to this tale, or at least a less agonizing end. No, there was no way to restore the configuration. No, I didn't get out of there at a reasonable hour,. No, the new firmware setup isn't better than the old one. No, the problems we were having with the 1520 dropping the line every 3rd day didn't go away. No, there was nothing good about the whole situation from Actiontec. The saving grace of it all was that the Qwest technicians have had more than enough of these things go bad that they are quite adept at reconfiguring them. In fact, instead of 2+ hours of pain, it took less than 45 minutes of pain to reconfigure it this time. Wow, progress.
While you may hold out hope that they future bios upgrades will have the recovery program built in to the upgrade program (Duh people, get a clue), or that they would offer the option of downloading the configuration that they knew would be lost, then reuploading it afterwards (Duh people, get a clue), I don't hold out such hope. If you go to the stylish web site that is Actiontec central, and follow the links to the products page, you are greeted with a fear mongering flash animation. "Adult content, predators, pornography and kidnapping" are among the phrases I now associate with Actiontec. Any company that uses techniques to sell products that make the editors of the local TV news cringe make me nauseas. I want a firmware upgrade, not a list of all the theoretical ills of the internet in animated form. I hold out no hope. I wonder how much a used 678 costs on Ebay? µ
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