[Coco] My web page

[Gene Heskett]

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.