Little, yellow, light.

[darkblade1.livejournal.com]

*head desk*

Can anyone give me a good reason why Motorola decided to put a option on the modem for standby?

I think it's just there to piss off techs when the time comes.

"What lights do you have on your modem?"

"Just that little yellow one."

Wow, thanks Motorola for making our lives more frustrating than it already is.

Comments

[200iso.livejournal.com]

that button is a major contributing factor to my low handle time :)

[dr-atheist.livejournal.com]

So I can easily switch between networks that may otherwise conflict. Also when playing resource intensive games I shut off any extraneous program I can, like messenger. AV programs are HDD intensive so I want to kill that and my firewall, but obviously don't want my machine to be open and online without these running, so it helps to turn the modem off without yanking cables out the back of the modem or my PC.
That's why.

[eightofspades.livejournal.com]

Just disabling the connection in your network properties isn't good enough?

[dr-atheist.livejournal.com]

Not really no, and more effort than pressing a little button on top of the modem right next to my monitor.

[teriwyn.livejournal.com]

RCAs are worse. When in standby mode, DHCP address will be granted to the connected computer or router or whatnot, but no traffic will pass. If you didn't check for a standby button, you might be tempted to think that there was a Comms problem in Windows, or that the customer had a software firewall.

I have gotten tickets where the tech has fought with the OS for hours... customer has been offline for weeks and everyone they talked to ripped their OS to shreads. Reinstall TCP/IP, extract winsocks, kill winsock reg keys... switch from Ethernet to USB, etc. The poor modem was just in standby. I would always check. Customers were dumbfounded and understandably pissed that they'd spent hours on the phone during multiple sessions (once a customer was down for almost two months, no joke...) over a silly little button.

Powercycle does not kill standby mode, and some of the older RCAs would drop into standby for weird reasons, and even no real reason at all.

RCAs are in standby when the lights are normal EXCEPT the power light (Internet light in more recent models) is OFF.

But, I no longer work internet tech support. Yay.

[110billion.livejournal.com]

I was speaking to a cable tech at my old ISP, and said "why the hell is there a standby light, and no reset button?"

[darkblade1.livejournal.com]

That's a valid point. I understand where squeee is also coming from. It serves a purpose, but then again it seems to switch to standby at random times. Why??

[jecook]

I was under the impression that Moto gave the customers a choice to turn off the intarnetweb connection when they were not using it in order to keep nasty DDoS attacks, worms, and the like from scanning for any machines by putting it there.

I think it's stupid. That's why one buys a freaking hardware firewall and parks it inline with the cable modem.

Yeah, that's trouble begging to happen, really.

[dmsalem00.livejournal.com]

They do it so paranoid bastards like me with a low budget can kill their internet connections ASAP when something that they shouldn't have tries to access the internet =X

Not that I'd ever be IN that situation, mind you..