[Cialug] OT: Cable Modem troubelshooting

[David Champion]

Off Topic question:
I have an Arris SB8200 cable modem on Mediacom, it was working perfectly
fine. Last week I started having flaky internet connection issues, it got
to the point where if I power cycle the modem, I could ping out to the WAN
gateway IP address for about 15 to 30 seconds, then it would stop.

The modem had all 4 of the lights lit up normally, no indication of
problems.

After bugging the 1st tier tech support guy at MC he finally looked hard
enough to confirm that they could see the connection dropping, and he
claimed they couldn't see the modem at all any more after that.

Tech came out yesterday, said the modem was bad, they left me a modem /
router - Ubee 1301 as a loaner and they're charging me $50 for the service
call. I was able to get into the admin on it and turn off wifi and change
the LAN IP, seem  to be working.

Question is: is there any troubleshooting I can do on the Arris modem? From
what I understand there's no way I can access it or update firmware, or see
if the provider pushed a bad firmware to it, I'm fully at their mercy. Is
this correct?

Good thing I still have my old Internetsolver / Aureon DSL as a backup.

-dc