Upgrading Netgear DG834PN

Posted on 14 October 2008 in
How to hardware geek

Something I thought I'd post up quickly which caused me a little trouble just now…

I tried to upgrade my Netgear DG834PN (an ADSL WiFi router, EXCELLENT piece of kit incidentally) from the stock 1.3.30 firmware to the latest (as of writing) 1.3.39. There was no particular reason for the upgrade - I'm just a "bleeding edge" kinda guy!

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Anyway, I initially tried to do it over wireless. I had concerns about this as I believe its generally bad practice to do this but there was nothing in the admin utility or on the firmware download page which told me specifically NOT to do it. The upgrade appeared to go out without any errors, however I did think it was odd that the router LOOKED like it had finished within about 10 seconds but the progress bar in Firefox was allowing for several minutes. Upon returning to the admin tool I was informed I was still running 1.3.30. I tried a hard reset (unplug, leave for a minute, plug back in) but there was no improvement.

I then decided to try it over a wired connection so I unplugged my LAN cable from my laser printer (HP LaserJet 2100TN - does the job!) and this time the router took MUCH longer (about several minutes) to do the upgrade. This time the router reports it is running 1.3.39 and I didn't even need to hard reset.

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Anyway - nothing particularly ground breaking, just thought if someone was Googling for a similar problem it might save them a few minutes.