Hi folks
Hope somebody can help out here...
I installed my first 2860 at a client's site a couple of weeks ago. Yesterday they asked if I could set up a VPN to their Windows 2008 server.

I've just spent the bulk of the day struggling, cajoling, shouting and pleading with the router to get it to work, only to discover (just now) that the firmware I'm using has a bug that prevents PPTP passthrugh from working properly.

I'm on F/W 3.8.2.3_VT1 and need to update to the latest version. Trouble is, the client site is over a hundred miles away. As a rule I prefer to update firmware while standing in front of the box itself but due to the distance I'd rather do this one remotely.

What's your experience of updating firmware on these routers? Will there be wrinkles and lost config settings or is it always clockwork?

Thanks gang!

Always updated mine remotely and never had an issue. Always a first, but I've not had issues.

Updated firmware several times remotely without any issues.

I've had a wan disconnection mid update but when you log back in, if the firmware is incomplete on the unit, it displays a 'firmware damaged' message which means the firmware must be uploaded again and while in that state the one thing you must not do is reboot or power cycle the router. (As far as I can see it'll keep running on a firmware copy running in memory indefinitely until a reboot clears the memory)

On a successful retry though it'll upgrade as normal.

Apart from the possibility of a wan disconnection mid transfer the chances of issue are the same as if done locally, so if upgrading a large number of units I'll load a similar cfg on a unit that's using the same source firmware version in the office first to check that all the functionality is operating as expected.

I'd imagine that it normally works fine as large users update 1000's of devices remotely using the ACS-SI platform and i'd guess that the router has some protection against not flashing until it has complete firmware ready...but if it's mission critical maybe at least have someone there who can reboot it in case...

Also has worked for me except once when I did something silly and had to upload it a second time. What I used to do, though, with earlier routers that were not so forgiving, was to get remote access to a PC on site (Draytek VPN/VNC or port forward/remote desktop) and use a browser on-site to update it so there is a hard connection from browser to router.