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I understand that a developing product needs updates. Sometimes these updates require changes to what data is expected for an element of the settings config. As a customer, when a firmware update i...
I could not agree more with the OP: demonic1 on 2016-12-28 10:26 AM
I totally support a change in the way Netgear is doing firmware updates.
It is perfectly understandable that a firmware update might deprecate a feature or add a feature. This makes restoring a saved settings config to new firmware very risky. However Netgear seems not to care that they break things for the home/small biz user. If they did care we would not have these issues.
Again the OP demonic1 put his finger on what I also think is happening: Netgear seems to have very poor version control with the programing teams. Things that are fixed get broken in the next update, or new things get broken.
Here is how demonic1 put it:
demonic1 wrote:
<snipped>
Perhaps, the bigger issue here may be change tracking. NetGear has demonstrated, on numerous occasions, as documented throughout the forums, a severe lack of procedure when it comes to documenting and coordinating changes. As we have seen many times, a bug gets fixed in an update and then is broken again in the next update. This suggests that they have different teams working on different solutions using different versions of the code.
Also consider the web UI (in my case R7800) it is so jumbled one wonders if the whole thing was built by different freelancers that come and go with no continuity of approach and certainly no one supervising the over all organization.
[I also hate the way a change in one section of settings does not ripple out to other sections of settings. Change a device name in 'Attached Devices' and it DOES NOT change in the reserved list. Same device, same router... Unbelievable!]
As for using a telnet connection, that would seem doable ONLY if settings items remained in the same declared field or even page. Otherwise I would think that I would have to compare the structure of the new firmware with the way the old version was built. It is also a fix that few in the target market could implement.
But this does wet my appetite to get a look at the config dump.
Here is my bottom line: Netgear should at minimum provide notes with firmware updates that indicate changes to the underlying settings db structure. It should also provide an attribute in the saved config file that could be read by the new firmware update to flag an incompatible db structure. It would also be cool if there was a tool that could update the saved config to what ever the new firmware structure required.
When ever there is new firmware for my router I print each page of the web UI to a file, then after the update I manually re-enter all my setups. A big pain in b*tt, but too many times I have been burned by a router broken by a saved config loaded into new firmware. One should never do this on Netgear routers. (BTW, I could always restore my previous config into new firmware on my old D-Link. It always worked, except on one occasion where the new firmware would not allow an import from an old config.)
And my last note:
The OP started this thread on: 2016-12-28 10:26 AM
It got moved to Engineering Investigation on: 2017-09-08 02:12 PM
As I write this it is 2019.04.21... So is it realistic to think that Netgear actually cares that they break things, add to the difficulty for support personnel and end users? Given the time frame on this thread my answer would be that it is not a realistic expectation at all.
bc