Question

SB8200 System Time is wrong

  • 17 May 2023
  • 5 replies
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My SB8200 had been working fine for more than a year and a half, but this morning, it went catatonic.  Front panel lights were all still good, but the (separate) router could no longer see it.  The router itself seemed fine.  Rebooting the router made no difference.  Rebooting the modem re-established the connection and everything was fine.

 

About an hour later, the modem went catatonic again.  Another reboot, and everything was fine.  This time I tried to log into the modem to see if there was any useful information in the event log.  It told me my username or password was incorrect, which is highly unlikely since I use a password manager.  After multiple attempts to log in, I had to use the last 8 characters of the serial number as the password.  That worked, and I’ve reset the password.

 

The event log had no useful information, but I noticed the time of the most recent event was more than an hour earlier--before the most recent reboot!  I checked the status page, and it says the system time is about 62 minutes earlier than all of my other internet-connected devices (including my router).  If it were exactly 60 minutes off, I’d assume that it just didn’t acknowledge daylight saving time.  Nothing in the web interface seems to allow me to set the time, time zone, DST, or NTP server.

 

About an hour later, the modem was unreachable for the third time.  (And again, there was no indication of a problem on the front panel lights.)  Another reboot brought it back to life again.  But the system time is still 62 minutes early, which feels like a suspicious coincidence given the approximately hourly failures.

 

I have an even newer Arris modem, but I haven’t switched to it yet since activation/provisioning with Comcast/Xfinity is always a multi-day cascade of fail that I haven’t yet mustered the will to take the plunge again..

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5 replies

J

Same issue here. No problems until Comcast “upgraded service” in our area. Now we have no internet and they are blaming the Arris which has worked perfectly since we bought it last year. 

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After rebooting the modem several more times throughout the day, I began to wonder whether it kept overheating.  Maybe a capacitor went bad or something.

So, at 3PM, I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade to the Surfboard T25 I’ve had on hand.  I set it up and attempted to have Comcast provision it online.  When that (unsurprisingly) failed, I called.  The voice response unit told me Comcast had just finished performing an upgrade in my neighborhood and very insistently wanted to start my modem.  But since the old modem was no longer connected, it was very unhappy.

I finally got through to a human about 4 PM.  He spent more than an hour trying to activate the new modem, but failed.  He said he’d have to schedule a visit from a service tech.  I asked him specifically what indication he was seeing that made him want to send a field tech.  He said he didn’t know, it was the system telling him to scheduled the tech.

So, he scheduled a service technician to visit the following morning between 8 and 10 AM, which he confirmed with me three times.  I rescheduled a doctor’s appointment in order to be available.  The following morning, at 10:05, I called to find out where the tech was.

In the first of three arguments with the voice response unit, the automation informed me that I did not have any appointments scheduled.  Eventually, I got it to try to transfer me to a human.  Apparently the call-in queue was full, since it did not give me the option to wait for an agent or to have one call me back.  It simply said that all agents were busy and hung up on me.  The automation misheard one of my responses in the second call, and sent me down into the billing options, which dead end without a way to talk to a human.  In the third call, I managed to trick the automaton to put me in the queue for a callback.

Of course, after it calls you back, the system puts you on hold for a while.  The human I got understood the issue.  Expressed dismay at how badly the previous phone rep had handled my request (and also at how much money Comcast charges me).  He activated the modem in a minute or two.  I was back online by 11 AM, about 18 hours after I first got through to Comcast.

I’m impressed.  That was the BEST provisioning experience (for a modem, CableCARD, or even one of their own set-top boxes) I’ve EVER had with Comcast.

Now I need to log into the T25 and check the system time.

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I hit SEND on that reply right at noon.  I was only briefly surprised when it failed to submit because my new modem had hung up after just one hour.

I guess I’ll get to spend more quality time debating with the Comcast voice response unit.

J

Also had to make a tech appointment and when I called to confirm the time Comcast said I didn’t have an appointment. Feel like we are going through the same nightmare. Can’t wait for Sonic to bring fiber optic to our area so I can jump ship. 

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I’m surprised the T25 doesn’t show the system time.  The times in the event log are in some unknown timezone.  They’re neither GMT nor local, and I’m having trouble even aligning them to things I know happened (like failed and successful provisioning).

Oddly, the ADMIN tab and the Logout (sic) in the T25’s web UI don’t do anything.  But if you view the page source for the status page, you can find those links and navigate to them manually, which works just fine.  Very strange.

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