I came back home tonight to find my Internet broadband connection not working. My cable modem was online (green light as usual) and so I telnetted into my ZyXEL Prestige 314 broadband router to check WAN IP address settings and everything looked just fine. Still, I was unable to ping to IPs that I know are always up (e.g. 202.14.67.4, DNS server for ISP Pacific Supernet Hong Kong). I called i-CABLE tech support and after a rundown of troubleshooting steps which took about 20 minutes and included cycling the power of my cable modem and router to reset the IP address, the tech guy ran out of options and told me he'd have someone else get back to me by tomorrow. I called tech support again to just double-check the correct Subnet Mask setting and got another tech guy. The Subnet Mask setting I had (255.255.254.0) was actually correct and I again went through the process of resetting the IP address with this new guy. After that didn't help, the tech guy suggested that I bypass my router and connect the cable modem directly to a computer via Ethernet cable. So I connected the cable modem directly to my PowerBook G4/500 running Mac OS X 10.2.6 and guess what?... My PowerBook got assigned a different IP and the connection worked! So with that, I thanked the tech guy because then I knew that the problem was on my end and specifically with my broadband router. So then using my PowerBook, I visited ZyXEL's download page over a painfully slow modem connection and downloaded a new firmware file. Using the router's Web interface I upgraded the firmware from version 3.50(CA.1) to 3.50(CA.3). Unbelievably, that did the trick!
Posted by derek at August 21, 2003 11:50 PMI've got a D-Link router at home too, and it does has pretty advanced features and a nice web admin interface. I've been very happy with it, and always backup my configurations whenever I changed it.
One time, I upgraded my firmware for no appearently good reasons other than the fact that I knew there was a newer version out there. So, I downloaded it, and upgraded my router. However, all my settings were thrown away, and the router didn't allow me to import my backup, because it was a backup created by an older firmware version.
So, I've learned a lesson myself. "If it an't broke, don't fix it!"
In your case, you've done the right thing, Derek.
Posted by: Fred Choi on August 31, 2003 2:16 PM