when I update the firmware or push a new config file into the modem it’s behaviour seems very evil because I never can tell when it is finished. If the admin interface’s IP address changes as a result of the particular contents of the config taking effect, what are you supposed to do as the user? You don’t know when to reconfigure your end’s IP address to be in a compatible range according to the netmask you made up for compatibility; the TCP connection that http(s) is working on dies too, because the destination IP address and then the source address (hopefully, but when) changes for TCP.
What do you do? How do you get through this nightmare?
Even just the firmware updating thing seems to be a total pain, endless waiting, never knowing when it has taken effect; Maybe just a matter of the whole thing losing the plot in regard to the http/https connection or some ropey JavaScript at the browser end perhaps. It’s a matter of knowing what’s going on and when, and when the thing is rebooting.
It’s not quite so bad when you’ve only got one modem to do, but I have a mountain of them that all need firmware and config pushing into them.
It’s horrible anyway, even just doing the firmware alone, but the admin IP addresses I set in their config files are all individual, distinct, according to which ‘slot’ they will live in, as I have four modems and unfortunately the way I’ve set up the addressing for their admin interfaces is that they have distinct varying admin i/f IP addresses, which are 192.168.n.1 where n is the ‘slot’ =1,2,3,4, so I have to defer that until I know which slot each is going to go into.
I’m starting to once again question the use of RFC1918 addresses that I chose, because it means that it make it more difficult for Andrews and Arnold to telnet/ssh in and look at things remotely; for that they really need a ‘proper’ global routable address. If really desperate I suppose I could give them ssh access to a machine such as my raspberry pi and let them work from that for a while. It hasn’t arisen yet and it’s pretty unlikely. I made an account on my Firebrick for AA support staff to use, and the firebrick has some diagnostic tools in it but for some things you need a real computer to run tools from.