Verizon FIOS

[Rich Greenberg]

During the recent FIOS discussion, I had nothing to add, so I didn't.
Its been fine since it was installed 2+ years ago.

Just recently, I had some issues, and I wanted to pass along what I
encountered for the benefit of the group.

At first, both wired and wireless went dead. A power cycle fixed it, and
the wired connections had no furthur problems. The wireless was not
working. The first time or 2 the Verizon "In Home Agent" fixed it but
then it became intermittant and Agent could do nothing. Found a bug in
thier online diagnostics and a related bug in Agent. the online
diagnostic was reading my userid and passphrase, spelling it out
phonetically. My passphrase is several words with spaces between the
words, and the diagnostic ignored the spaces. Later, Agent asked me for
the passphrase and wouldn't allow me to enter the spaces.

Later, I called FIOS tech support and reported both bugs. I then
described the problems and asked what would it take to get a new modem.
He responded that he would send me one and it arrived the next day
(today). Aparantly they have decided that the modem I have is obselete
because they don't want it back. I will trash it after resetting it to
clear the passphrase. It will be installed tomorrow and I will follow
up if anything unusual happens.

One oddity in the old modem, its too slow to copy/paste the admin uid
and password. They must be hand typed. I will see if the new modem has
the same oddity.

[Mark F]

... Aparantly they have decided that the modem I have is obselete
because they don't want it back. I will trash it after resetting it to
clear the passphrase.

Resetting the passphrase is unlikely to erase it, so if you want to be
reasonably sure, take out anything that looks like memory and destroy
it.

One oddity in the old modem, its too slow to copy/paste the admin uid
and password. They must be hand typed. I will see if the new modem has
the same oddity.

What are the symptoms that you see? In other words, why do you think
the modem is too slow to copy/paste the password stuff?

My both my Actiontec (I don't remember the model or firmware) and my
new one (software says it is MI424WR-GEN3I, firmware 40.20.1)
did not echo one character for each character typed into the password
field. In fact, sometimes the number of characters would seem to
decrease, possibly indicating a control character, not a dot, was
being echoed. Both modems worked with paste into the "User Name"
field. account field; neither works with paste into the "Password"
field, although both seem to echo exactly 1 character for each
character pasted into the "Password" field. I tried pasting
one character at a time with the new modem and entering
the password that way doesn't work. I even tried typing
all but the last character and pasting the last character and
it didn't work.

I also tried various combinations of operating systems and browsers,
including
. Windows 7
. Chrome
. going to 192.168.1.1 and getting the login page displayed
. disconnecting Ethernet
. typing in the User Name and Password
The User Name echoed correctly (as when Ethernet remained connected);
the Password echoed the same flaky way as with Ethernet connected,
even though the Actiontec was not in play.

Reconnecting the Ethernet cable and hitting enter got me logged
on.

Repeating the experiment with pasting just the last character
also failed to login.

So, the "echo" logic and bug are in the HTML, not a timing
thing in the Actiontec.

[Rich Greenberg]

Post by Mark F

... Aparantly they have decided that the modem I have is obselete
because they don't want it back. I will trash it after resetting it to
clear the passphrase.

Resetting the passphrase is unlikely to erase it, so if you want to be
reasonably sure, take out anything that looks like memory and destroy
it.

So noted.

Post by Mark F

One oddity in the old modem, its too slow to copy/paste the admin uid
and password. They must be hand typed. I will see if the new modem has
the same oddity.

What are the symptoms that you see? In other words, why do you think
the modem is too slow to copy/paste the password stuff?

Less "blobs" echoed than hand typing. And it rejects it as "bad userid
and/or password"

New modem accepted a pasted password.