[Coco] My web page

[Greg Law]

I've dealt with Netgear before and got nothing but runaround trying to get a 
NAS repaired under warranty. I finally got fed up and banned Netgear from my 
life permanently. As it stands, I wouldn't touch Netgear products even if 
the gave them to me.

I've been running an ASUS RT-N66U with Tomato for the past couple of years 
and haven't had a single problem with it. The RT-N66U is an excellent router 
hardware-wise, but the firmware leaves a lot to be desired. Tomato has a lot 
of options and has been rock solid, even locking out remote access from the 
wireless and WAN side with a couple checkboxes.

-----Original Message----- 
From: Gene Heskett
Sent: Tuesday, January 07, 2014 3:25 PM
To: coco at maltedmedia.com
Subject: [Coco] My web page

Greets all;

Sometimes you have to be a little schmardter than the average bear.

I got tired of noting the extremely poor upload performance of my buffalo
hi-power router in recent weeks, a speed test showed what should have been
a 2 megabit upload speed was actually doing under 100k bits a sec.

So I tried to reset it and reflash it, but managed to about half brick it
because I couldn't find the reset button, turns out you have to snap the
snap on base off it for access to the reset button hole.

But when I put another netgear in its place, I DHCP'd a different IP
address from the one my registered name below points at.  Not good.  I
found a mini-dd-wrt install for it and put that in.  Same but wrong
address.

Called shentel, who gave me a run-around about how my address was dynamic.
Wanted to charge me another 5 bucks a month for a fixed address, but it
wouldn't be the old one.  Then they wanted the MAC from my router so they
could set it up, and the leds all came on spelling out _bingo!_

So I reset the Buffalo, hooked it up long enough to get its DHCP derived
address, which was indeed the old one and wrote down its WAN MAC.  Then I
switched cables around, logged into the netgear, and "cloned" that MAC into
its WAN port.   Bingo was right, and after a minor adjustment to httpd.conf
since this router cannot port forward AND translate the port #, so it is
now listening on port 6309, and my web page should be back up and
accessible again.

That netgear, a WNR-3500U/WNR3500L, running its own firmware, did not last
the night last night, when I woke up this morning it was working, but my
username and password had been changed.  Black Hat or NSA, same diff,
somebody got in and played.

There are not any backdoors in dd-wrt since its not even a US built
software.  I highly recommend it, if your router has enough flash and ram
to handle it.  The failed buffalo has 32 megs of flash, and 16 megs of ram
so it can do it all in one swell foop.  The netgear is much more resource
limited, so the install is a 2 step install, but it will fit in the 4 megs
of flash in that unit and do 95% of what the full version can do.  Setup a
decently long username and password, and NSA will be forced to use their
still a long ways from ready, Quantum computer to hack it before the
universe runs down.

Gotta love it when a plan comes together.  In the meantime I'll buy another
buffalo or similarly souped up router now that I know how to make the
switch invisible to shentel. :)

Now, if that pair of SALT chips would appear, but I think they may be
sealed in a bottle, thrown in the harbor in Shanghai so it will drift to
the US eventually.  I hope...

Cheers, Gene
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>

Chicago law prohibits eating in a place that is on fire.
A pen in the hand of this president is far more
dangerous than 200 million guns in the hands of
         law-abiding citizens.

--
Coco mailing list
Coco at maltedmedia.com
http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/coco