DG814 Important Firmware ISSUE (4.8 - DONT)

[Vini]

i flash to the recently released (09/07/2003) 4.8 Firmware after DJ_Smilee said it had cool new features... well. From what i saw it had a lot of new things, however, nothing different to 4.7.

2 hours later, i got disconnected (this was nothing out of the norm, and has been happening for 2 months or so) but this time it connected at about 9'600bps making the net super slow.

Instantly i blamed BT, as you do, so i logged onto their site and it said they were having problems with many HG's (home gateways) so i thought fair enough, itll be fine in a couple of hours. 36 hours later, still slow, connecting at 9'600 speeds.

So i racked my brain trying to think what it could be, and i came to the conclusion that it must be the Firmware i flashed, only 2 hours before i got these problems.

So i logged into the admin part of the router to view the logs, but the clever people at Netgear have really fubar'd the 4.8 firmware, so that any Radio Button you hit, takes you to a nice blank .CSS page, where clearly theyve screwed their coding up.

So basically your stuffed once this happens, not even a hard reset will do, because of course after it wipes your details you cant click the next button to take you to the "setup wizard" or to the "basic settings" form.

So i called Netgear, and i got through to some foreign woman who, im sure they just employed to rack up lengthy and expensive phone calls.

She needed me to spell every word, and i mean every word.

However, she was alright about it, and she asked me how old it was, to which i replied - "just over a year" - i thought, oh god, im gonna get screwed over by a 1 year warranty. Anyhow she said, fine we'll issue an RMA. Bummer i thought, i'm gonna be without the web here, then i remembered we still have our frog and i have a switch. SORTED GEEZ.

So now, i have a new (I HOPE) DG814 being shipped, and when i receive it i have to return my old one. SAFE.

Just slightly annoyed at the crap firmware issue, just letting you people know dont touch it.

[Jonny M]

Netgear have outsourced tech support to India, that's probably why you had trouble understanding each other.

Surely any sort of testing would have shown the 4.8 firmware to be crap? Netgear have really gone downhill as soon as they moved out of blue metal boxes IMO.

[Paul Adams]

Hmm, the DG814's do seem to be having a rough time of it lately - I've read a number of reports of units disconnecting and requiring a hard reset to come back to life, and a colleague was experiencing this kind of problem with his router.

He upgraded the firmware to 4.7 RC2 and it appeared to fix it, then as soon as he set up a port forwarding rule BLAM - box completely died, never to come back again.

RMA'd and got the 802.11b version of the router and it seems fine.

Touch wood, the other 4 DG814's we bought at the same time seem fine.

I always end up holding my breath when doing BIOS/firmware updates at the best of times, so I don't think I'll risk 4.8.

Thanks for the heads-up

[Agent]

Doesnt it have a serial port on the Router ?
You can reflash it through that in most cases.

[scottyman]

you can reflash with the bin-file, if you grab the original standard firmware from the site, it will reset your config if you upload it over ftp.

then you can reload your standard (previous) firmware.

it's also possible you've got a serious config problem.

[jamin]

I had a nightmare setting up on of these for a small network! It wouldn't take a custom ip address. Worked it out after about 3 hours, but wouldn't supply another one...

Gimme a nice efficient networks 5861 any day, might only be 10mbs on the lan side but lovely to work on!