3Com Router Update: not an easy task

I’m not sure if I’ll now start being one of the quickbloggers, but I think this might come useful to someone else.

If you have a 3Com Wireless Router, using some custom IP ranges (in my case 192.168.0.¹⁶⁄₂₈ rather than the default 192.168.1.0/24), and after a firmware upgrade it doesn’t respond anymore, the reason is that for some reasons, it came up with the default IP address; restarting it won’t help, but if you go to LAN settings, and apply again after making sure the custom address is there, it will work.

Now, I’m pretty much satisfied with my 3Com router, as it’s able to cope with the large amount of packets coming, almost all of it coming through WLAN (as even my servers gets to the ADSL through wireless, and I rarely come down to use the direct connection), and it never died, whereas both my old D-Link, and some of my friends’ OpenWRT-based routers crash on high workloads. Something I can’t really grok is who designed their interface..yes you can access almost all functions of the router, but the Virtual Servers configuration is the essence of the dumbness: it not only allow you to redirect ports to arbitrary IP addresses, as the default will allow you only to change the last octet of the LAN IP address, but it also does not take into consideration netmasks at all! You can put 172.16.0.1 as address for the router, and you won’t be able to forward a port to 172.16.3.4.

I also tried to tell that to their tech support, but they first didn’t understand what my problem was, then they asked me to register on their site (thing that was impossible at the time as the sever refused registration) and when they offered to register me directly from email, and I sent them the data, I got no answer at all!

I remembered better of 3Com’s support, it’s thanks to 3Com Italy that I got first connected to the net, as when I asked them if they had some cheap old version of their UsRobotics modems (I was young, 14, so I didn’t have enough money to buy a modem myself, and it was just the time when the first “free” ISPs started in Italy), they simply sent me a 33.6 internal ISA modem, that I used for many years before it was burnt down by an electric discharge during a storm (together with the PC’s motherboard it was attached to). Unfortunately it seems they ended up to the level of some of the worst tech supports I know.