The IT Nerd

Those who have followed my journey with Bell Fibe will know that there are two ways to use your own router with Bell’s hardware, in my case an Home Hub 4000. There’s the PPPoE method and the Advanced DMZ method. The latter has worked for me more or less flawlessly for months. And that was despite an ASUS XT8 firmware update that caused some issues with Advanced DMZ for a bit. But that changed last week when Bell dropped this firmware update that seems to have made the Advanced DMZ functionality unusable:

This firmware appeared on my HH4000 sometime last week, and yesterday Bell forced a reboot on my HH4000 which took down my network. Despite my best efforts, I could not get Advanced DMZ to work. Thus I had to resort to going to a double NAT setup which is not ideal. But it works for me so far.

My theory is that a combination of the most recent ASUS firmware that I have on my XT8 router and this new Bell firmware is responsible for Advanced DMZ not working properly. There’s no way for me to test this from the Bell side of the fence as there’s no way to roll back firmware updates with Bell hardware. What I may do is roll back the firmware on the XT8 and test again. But that isn’t a today problem for me as I have other priorities at the moment, and things are working at the moment. When I do get around to doing this, I will post an update. But if you suddenly have issues with your Bell setup, you now know where to look in terms of where to start your troubleshooting.

This entry was posted on August 28, 2023 at 10:07 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Bell. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.