Router/ Modem oddities

Hi,

This is a strange one that I am completely lost with. I am currently trying to solve a work problem I have.

Basically we are in the business of testing/ reconditioning routers for a major cable supplier.

Sometimes those modems come back with unreadable labels and we want to generate new ones before they can be sent out again. So, to get the details that would usually be on the label we log in to the routers homepage. Recently logging into the router homepage has been timing out though eventually connecting after a time, usual internet use through the router is fine.

I suspect that maybe it has something to do with the same PC being hammered by hundreds of different modems over a period of time but what would I need to do to get it back to running 'as new'

Having only limited knowledge (a dangerous thing I'm told ) I cleared the arp cache but this hasn't made any difference. Any help would be appreciated.

P.S I'm a maintenance technician not I.T. so not sure how it has become my problem to solve but there you go.

Thanks,

Euan

 

I doubt that hooking a computer to a large number of different modems would cause interface lag on one particular modem hookup, i would suggest that modem gets hard reset, and then if still issues that modem probably is no longer functioning correctly.

 

Thanks for your reply.

You may be right though each of these modems would have been through functional test by this point and I do have confidence in our test software.

We also used to do TomTom re-imaging here and eventually after about 5000+ units the whole imaging station would keel over and die - Eventually we found out it was because the operating system would take a hissy fit after having 5000 + different usb devices attached to it. I was thinking this might be something similar.

As an update I emailed the day shift IT guys who supposedly went and looked at it where it was working fine so they concluded nothing was wrong :-D

Doesn't help me on the late shift with no IT support though.

I'll let you know if I turn anything else up.

Cheers

 

Usb devices hang around in the os, but as far as ethernet its not really changing anything, because its only communicating using the existing network card drivers? If that makes sense to you? Like each usb device installs a new copy of its drivers?

 

If all you are talking about is the MAC address and Serial number info, that is really all you would have to pull from the modem. Now of course if the modem was bricked or is looking for a connection to the ATM before it allows the user to gain access to the main page, that can be a problem.

Really would be easier to use a VM or a dedicated computer that is just for this test bench, which you could do with something like a Raspberry Pi. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_pi

 

Yes MAC address and Serial primarily. This is done at a dedicated bench outwith the test.

Funny thing is the test software we use is able to interrogate this information through mibs anyway but that happens away from this standalone process during the pre-ship.

To be honest I haven't heard anymore about it for the last few days, probably means it has either resolved itself (unlikely) or the operators are just putting it up with it.

FYI, modems aren't bricked though - really is a case of router homepage timing out or being unavailable (for a time, couple of minutes is a long time in a production enviroment) yet being otherwise fully functional.

 

I would consider not being able to reach the config interface of a modem with in seconds bricked personaly, cause if im working at a customers house and trying to setup/modify/fix there network and i can't pull the modems interface page up, im replacing that modem.