DSL Modem Upgrade

I recently received a box of old DSL modems from a friend who no longer used them. In the box was a SpeedStream 5260. This was a newer model than the one I currently use, so I thought it was worth looking at. I first tried to go to the SpeedStream website, but as you can tell from clicking the link, it sent me to the Efficient knowledge base. I suspect this was a company that bought SpeedStream, which in turn was bought by Siemens. I didn't find any useful information, though. It looks like they had the quick start guide, but I already had that.

Having not found anything through the corporate channels, I started searching for the 5260 through Google. There I found the intriguing link 4 Step by Step Upgrade Instructions.... This page describes how to upgrade the 5260 to function as a 5660. It looks like the main difference between the two is that the 5660 can act as a router with a web configuration application. The writer recommends updating to the 2.1.0 version of the firmware first, however. Since the 2.1.0 firmware is no longer available and that I use another system as a router, I decided to just leave it as is.

The configuration will be based on the requirements listed in Table 1, “5260 Configuration Requirements”.

After about two days of functioning I discovered that the 5260 had hung hard, showing an amber system light. A simple power cycle did not clear the error. I replaced the 5260 with the old modem to get my connection back on line.

I discovered that if I pressed and held the power button for a few seconds instead of a quick press and release, the 5260 would come up. I decided at that point that upgrading the firmware was worth the risk. My assumption is that the problem was a bug in the firmware that might be resolved with a firmware change.

I tried uploading different firmware versions, but I kept getting the error shown in Figure 1, “Error Message Uploading Firmware to SpeedStream 5260”.

Error: image platform [0x3] expecting [0x5]
      

I found a reference to this error message which seemed to indicate a problem with a corruped archive. I first tried fixing the images by adding "00" to the end of the other 5660 images as was recommended, but that didn't seem to work either. However, this thread also had a link to a firmware image that seemed to be the missing 2.1.0 5660 firmware. I eventually tried the 2.1.0 image without editing it and it worked properly. The firmware was accepted and after rebooting, the version number reflected the updated firmware.

One advantage to this upgrade is that the snmp configuration settings are now available.

In bridge mode, the 5660 firmware doesn't seem to work correctly. I believe that it isn't replying properly to the arp who-is request. I can see these requests, but no replies are seen. I tried changing the IP address of the dsl modem to see if that would make a difference, but it didn't. I also experimented with turning on the spanning tree mode, but that didn't work either. What did work was updating the firmware to version 2.3.0(7). This resolved the problem without other changes.