I had a customer that was given one of those crappy usb-only adsl modems by netspace.net.au

Amongst other things, they wanted to setup their new vista laptop to connect to the internet.

Rather than muck around with pretend dialup networking, I decided to use their old telstra thomson speedtouch 530.

Since I took the PC and modem back to the office, I decided to setup the modem for their current isp.

The modem seemed to be locked to telstra, and wouldn’t let me change the user details… (I once again forgot that I had to hit “disconnect” in order to make username changes… grrr).

I found a forum that hinted at fixing the problem by ftp-ing to the modem, going to the dl directory, and deleting the isp.def file.

So I deleted the file before my own common sense told me to make a backup…

Anyway, now there is no field for entering a username at all… so no way of configuring the modem.

A factory reset has no effect.

So after a lot of searching, I found speedtouch ppoe.ini file (from the iso image of the speedtouch cdrom, somewhere on the internet), renamed it to isp.def, copied it to where the original isp.def was, reset the modem to factory defaults, and was then able to enter in the new isp username and password.

A lot of effort, that I could have avoided by being more careful 🙁