I work for a cable company in the tier 3 department... upgrades are taking place for docsis 3.0, nodes have all been upgraded but they just started the switch in for the headend... my question is > We have these old motorola 4200's and 4100's and i can see them lock down in docsis tools(onlinept) i can send reset hits to it and watch it the modem do the how dance from InitD to initO to onlinePK all the way to onlinept.. but no RF signals are registering and docsis tools doesnt identfy the firmware.. i send an email to the headend and they say no firmware update is necessary. Anyone else seen or heard of this? I even called the customer had him reset verified conn. ect ect. and also i used another tool (iglass) and all upstream downstream rf and signal to noise all looked great.. i didnt know if a firmware update was needed because dont these use BPI and doesnt docsis 3.0 use SEC? Any info would be greatly appreciated ! Also a caveat, we see the same the with other CM's that are either the 4100's or the 4200's and it started RIGHT after the docsis 3.0 upgrade.
all or some?
It's my understanding that both of those are DOCSIS 1.1 modems - but the 4200 might have some 2.0 RF capabilities. Since they're 1.1 they'll show up as online(pt) (meaning BPI+) when registered. When you say "no RF signals are registering", I'm guessing that means they're not answering SNMP properly? Is this will all of those units or just a select few? Hacked modems often won't answer SNMP, but if they're all doing it I'm wondering if there's an issue with the poller.
SNMP Info
I'm betting you've been polling modems via snmp with the default community string of public. Cable labs had companies who make modem remove the default snmp string because customers who have some type of snmp program can get into modems and make changes. so thinking the provisioning group created a modem file with a different snmp read-only string and the tool used uses that word to get info and stats. in the modem file is the option to create a ready-only and read-write community string. confirm the community string in the modem files and that it matches what's used in the tools program. they need to match to get your data.
~Carl