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Here in Corvallis, I've rented the bottom half of a house. The owner has Comcast cable Internet access. It's pretty nice --- 2mbps downloads, though uploads are only 150-200kbps. He's got a wireless router and connects using a laptop on the wireless network.
Rather than running more wires, I got a wireless bridge (Netgear ME101) and plugged that into the WAN port on a wireless router (Netgear WGT624). Unfortunately, Netgear doesn't seem to be any better than Linksys for sensitivity --- despite being only about 40' and 1 floor away from the access point and having 49% signal strength, I could get no "quality" and thus no packets through. About 5' closer and I got about 50% packet loss, but another 5' or so, in the middle of my kitchen, all of a sudden full speed ahead!
A quick trip to Fry's, and an SMC EZ-Connect antenna allowed me to at least move the bridge out of the middle of my kitchen, though I have to put it as close to the access point as I can get it in the computer room (I *thought* the box said "6db gain", but I can't seem to find that now, might explain why it just barely works).
All was good, until I started noticing that my ssh connections were getting dropped while I was gone. I expect that through a NAT router, and had keepalives turned on to prevent that. After a while, as I used the computer more, it started happening while I was on, and I noticed that the router's power light turned from green to orange for a bit, then back to green: the bloody thing was rebooting. And doing it *a lot*.
Sooo, tonight I connected to the really rather nice web interface the router has, and checked the option to "check for an update". Sure enough, I have version 4.0.4, and 4.1.11 is available. I clicked the button "sure, go ahead and upgrade yourself". It downloaded, then did the update, and then the browser, which had been doing the 1 second status refresh thing said "connection timed out". I expected that, as it would reboot when it finished the update. I looked over, and sure enough, the power light was orange, then went green. For about 3 seconds. Then it went orange again. Then green... Then orange...
Yup. The update apparently failed and my brand new router is a doorstop.
And now we get to the subject of this whole tale: calling Netgear for "support". Getting in actually wasn't too hard --- call the right number for having the product less than the 90 days you get for free tech support (rather than the number "have your credit card ready" for "premium" support). Though it says "you may have to wait for 20 minutes and you really should use our website for help instead", I actually got someone fairly quickly.
The glitch, and to be fair, they did warn me about it in the voice menus getting to a real person, was that you have to register the product before they'll help you. Of course, with my router down, I *had* no Internet connection to register with. "I'm sorry, without the registration code, I can't get any information in my database to help you with". Great. Although I didn't really expect to be able to do anything other than RMA or take it back to Fry's (though it *should* have a default ROM to revert to --- it's a standard failsafe for things that can update themselves), they won't even talk to me.
That is really unacceptable customer "support", though with firmware as buggy as this, it's no wonder they're doing everything they can to make it hard to get in, and *still* have 20 minute wait times apparently.
Because the owner's access point is another firewall router, I've plugged the wireless bridge into a switch instead of a firewall, which is not ideal, but I'm not really worried about him or wardrivers, so it works for now...
Posted by abatie at July 7, 2004 10:20 PM