[ILUG] OT - eircom netopia ADSL modems firmware upgrade

[Shane McLaughlin]

Apologies for the offtopic post
If anyone could refer me to better place for discussing eircoms modems
i'd be eternally grateful
My problem:
Port forwarding (pinholes) doesn't seem to work satsfactorilyon the
eircom 3347NWG with their (older, feature-reduced) Eircom branded
firmware.

A bit of background:
I'm trying to run several apps thru the NAT - (bittorrent, VNC, VPN,
netmeeting, certain online games etc. that require port forwarding to
work properly, otherwise they're firewalled.
Eircom seem to have commisioned a branded version of the standard
netopia firmware, that has butchered the featureset, and renamed the
labels to such an extent that both theirs, and netopias help docs are
useless. I've correctly set up and enabled the forwarding, but it
won't work.

Solution:
This guy here - http://www.haviker.co.uk/netopia.html - had similar
issues and upgraded his firmware to the standard netopia one and it
worked.

Has anyone here done this? updated the firmware on their eircom modem?
Do any of you have  a suggestion to where i could look for more info
(an online forum/mailing list/group etc. ) discussing general Irish
broadband issues? I don't want to turn my new router into an expensive
paperweight and am looking for info on what steps were needed.

Sorry for using you like a directory service, but am a returning
ex-pat, i'm not up to speed on the irish I.T. & broadband scene.