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Diagnosis of a Broken Firmware

With a working serial console, I put back the broken firmware upgrade. The boot process runs swimmingly, and within 15 seconds, the modem seems, for all appearances, operational. The only problem is, of course, that it doesn't appear on the network.

With my nifty console access, I have a look a the network interface statistics. Everything is up, but the ethernet bridge, br0 doesn't have an IP address assigned to it. So I type

ifconfig br0 192.168.0.1

and the box comes back to life. Well, that was simple. I dig through the web interface to make sure the boot settings were set up correctly. But no matter how many times I reconfigure the settings, always, after boot, the bridge will come up with no IP address. Useless.

So I examine the situation a little deeper. This upgraded firmware seems to actually have features and options missing that were there before. That's odd. What's even more odd still is the version information as stored in /etc/ver.dat. While the original firmware is version:

QW04-3.60.2.0.6.3-GT701-WG

the "upgraded" firmware comes up with

3.60.1.0.4.1-GT701-WG

It seems the the upgrade is not only a non-Qwest build, but it's also version 3.60.1 instead of 3.60.2. In other words, the upgrade is actually a downgrade.

Well, that solves the problem enough for me. I don't feel any more desire to downgrade my firmware. The modem works great, the Internet service is optimal, and now I have a serial adapter that I can use on all sorts of periphrials. An evening well spent.