Up late... Thanks Qwest...

I was up late earlier tonight and I was messing around with my DSL modem's settings. I was having a little bit of trouble and I wanted to make things run a little more smoothly. I got curious and I wondered if there was a firmware upgrade for my modem. It turns out that there was one! I quickly downloaded it and installed it. My modem then rebooted and everything looked normal. I tried to connect to the modem. Everything was dead! No response! What in the world happened?

Not knowing what to do now, I found the CD that came with the modem and browsed through it. I found some utility that was called gtrecover.exe, I believe it was. I ran it and it was able to restore the old firmware to the modem and reboot it. I then ran the setup utility that came on the CD and got connected back up to the internet. Wow, I saved a disaster!

I then did some searching on what went wrong with my modem's firmware upgrade. My findings surprised me...

From http://www.tlarson.com/guides/dslhack/diag:

[blockquote]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:

[code]QW04-3.60.2.0.6.3-GT701-WG[/code]

the "upgraded" firmware comes up with

[code]3.60.1.0.4.1-GT701-WG[/code]

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.[/blockquote]

Qwest, you have great DSL service, but why do you have a broken firmware upgrade on your site? Can you please do something about this? You cost me a couple of hours of sleep. For others without as much experience as me, it might be an entire night of sleep, or more. Please fix this...