I managed to update my CS2 over Tha Interwebs last night -- eventually!
Background: I have a small home network on Optus cable, with a Motorola Surfboard SB5100 Cable Modem, and a Netgear RP614 router doing DHCP servise. Everything works well.
This time (as before), I just connected the network cable and started the CS2. I clicked on "Update". There was some downloading (with a few red squares in amongst the yellow), followed by 3/4 of the "updating flash" (or whatever...)
Then "Update failed"
This happened several more times.
I was puzzled, since last time it was completely problem-free.
After a rush of blood to the head, I checked the CS2's IP address: 192.168.1.10 (or .somethingelse, 192.168.1.x, anyway)
Odd, since the router restricts DHCP addresses to 192.168.0.1 to 192.168.0.49 -- the router is 192.168.0.50
There is no choice over the 192.168.0.x range, other than the .x value.
Hmmmm, the CS2 had "Automatic" checked for the IP address.
The CS2 was not listed on the router's "Attached Devices" list, either.
While the CS2 could talk to the internet, for some reason this conflict was causing the update to fail, I think.
I manually set the CS2's IP address to 192.168.0.10, et voila!, it worked!!!
(Also, the CS2 now appeared on the router's "Attached Devices" list.)
So, a tip -- if the CS2 connects, but the update fails, check the IP address of the CS2 versus what your router thinks it should have.
I'm not quite sure what happened there (i.e. why it didn't successfullyt update the first times) -- perhaps a network-guru can explain that.