Firmware corruption on SB8200?

[cxrider]

I've been on the phone most of the day between Comcast and Arris.   It all started with an outage this morning. After power cycling my modem and not getting link, I called Comcast.   The Comcast tech tried to provision my modem and the provisioning failed.    The modem now appears to be in a 60-65s reboot cycle; I watch the LEDs illuminate, go off except the power, rinse and repeat 60-65s later.   If I plug an ethernet cable into the modem ethernet port and the other end goes into my system, so i have a direct connection, I am not able to reach the modem on the 192.168.100.1 address.   And yes, I have configured a static address of 192.168.100.2/24 on my system.  

After giving up on getting the SB8200 working, I grabbed my old modem SB6121, and it worked after provisioning by Comcast.

I then called Arris to see if there was a way to flash firmware.  After going through the factory reset with the Arris tech, I was told that Comcast has seemingly caused an outage with SB8200 modems.   Apparently, there is something wrong with the firmware that was pushed 15 Jan 2020.    The Arris tech told me that this is a Comcast issue and there is nothing they can do to help resolve the problem.

Has anyone else experienced this?   If so, why can't/won't Comcast simply roll back to the previous firmware and debug this in their lab(s) instead of on my modem? 

[JoeC00]

I had an outage on that same day too. And I have an Arris SB8200 modem. At first I called Comcast and I got someone with an accent that did state they had multiple complaints from people with the SB8200 modems. They stated to reset, which I already did several times with no luck so I contacted service to come out to my home.

A service tech came out, to which he connected his green lighted (word redacted) box (just lights, no real measurement of readings) and said everything was o.k. on their end. He disconnected my modem and connected one of his which worked and he condemned my modem stating that it was bad. I called Arris because this was a brand new modem that I just purchased a couple months ago and they stated that Comcast was in fact having a problem with the SB8200 modems.

Called back to Comcast again but this time I got someone who spoke english with no accent. He said he checked my connection and it was going in and out and can have another tech out tomorrow. That evening in my frustration I unplugged my modem for about an hour and then reconnected and everything has been up and running fine (must be some kinda comcast magic) I called Comcast and cancelled the scheduled service call for the next day and everything has been just peachy since.

Side note: The first tech did replace my PPC EVO 1-5-U/U splitter and installed a couple little splitters but it made no difference after he left because I still did not have service

I do not kow why Comcast never admitted that they did something to my modem. I did suspect a bad update but they would not say they did that when I asked the second time I called.

[cxrider]

Ohhh.... interesting.   

When did your modem start working again?   When did it go out?   In which state do you reside?  I tried to have my SB8200 activated Tuesday morning and it was still dead.    If your modem started working after I tried activation then maybe there's been a change in the system and maybe mine will start working again.....

FWIW, I have a single cable, no splitters, no unions, and compression F connectors so it's not as if I'm using a <Edited> connector or wire.   Additionally, the tech checked my segment from box to modem and said it was as clean as it could be.

You may want to post your observations on this thread 

Disregard the above, I see you posted on the thread.  🙂

[cxrider]

I purchased a new SB8200.   It responds on both 192.168.100.1 and 192.168.0.1.  

[i_am_feldman]

@cxrider Thanks for the images. Are you connected to it directly from a PC, or through a Wi-Fi gateway? My gateway's IP address is 192.168.0.1 so that won't work for me for sure.  

[cxrider]

My modem is plugged into an Extreme X460-48t.  The Extreme X460 is  a managed switch and the modem is on a vlan with the WAN interface of my router.     My router is a Linksys WRT 1900 ACS running OpenWRT.    Those images happened to be created from a wifi client on the private network.    I get the same behaviour from a wired client.  The modem did not start responding to the 192.168.0.1 address until I enabled aggreation on it.    I do not use 192.168.0.0/24 or 192.168.100.0/24 on any of my networks.

[i_am_feldman]

@cxrider Thak you! You solved it! Unlike the SB6121 which I used before, the SB8200 reserves 192.168.100.X/24 and 192.168.0.X/24 for itself. All I needed to do is to change my home network IP address to something else (non-conflicting) and now I have access to status screen.

Arris should make this easier to understand in their documentation...

[iurii_ivanov]

Same happened to me with SB8200 in MA beginning of July. 65S constant restarts, exactly the same situation as yours, no help from Comcast no matter what they did. On my initial request they said that nothing's changed on their end and they hadn't heard about any similar issues when I referenced similar cases. But then the next day they called me and said that they might have a solution as there was an outage in my area which might've caused the issue. We went through the process, but nothing changed. I ended up buying a different Netgear CM1000 modem.