Joe's Random Ramblings

In my ongoing quest to get IPv6 tunneling working with my AT&T DSL connection, I stumbled across more stupidity...

In an effort to resolve the 15-second DHCP renewal time I was seeing on a D-Link DSL modem that I tried (mentioned here,) I first contacted D-Link tech support about the issue. Unfortunately, the technician couldn't help me, so I ended up returning the DSL modem.
I now got a Motorola 2210-02 DSL modem (originally developed by Netopia, which apparently got bought by Motorola.)
This modem has the AT&T firmware installed. This firmware allows modifying the DHCP lease time, just like my old Speedstream did.
However, and that's a BIG issue, the 2210 does not respond to pings, i.e., ICMP packets. This prevents me from updating the IPv6 tunnel at HE's tunnelbroker service. They try to ping the IPv4 address entered...
I can go through the universal Ipv6 tunnel at 192.88.99.1, though, so this modem at least doesn't block IPv6.

I was on the phone with AT&T level 2 tech support for quite some time, but this didn't go anywhere, except for trying bridge mode, where the PPPoE handling is done on the computer. For a variety of reasons, a major one being that this would prevent me from just plugging in another computer, e.g., for testing, I do not particularly like bridge mode.
The last time I set up PPPoE on my Linux box was about 10 years ago, when I still had connectivity through ISDN... I had assumed that we are past that unfriendly setup by now

And for completeness, I also tried a Motorola 2210-02 with a non-AT&T firmware. While that didn't have the ping issue and let ICMP through fine, it was only marginally better than the D-Link in that it had a DHCP lease renewal time of 2 minutes, non-changeable of course
Why can't the modem manufacturers not just provide a firmware that isn't crippled???