router

Edit: This has been fixed in the latest firmare update 4.5.10.25

The routers that you receive from your ISP are almost always garbage: not many options to configure and pitiful wifi range. The router/modem that Shaw customers receive is the Hitron CGNM-2250 thankfully isn't completely terrible, 802.11ac plus gigabit ports. I was poking about and researching the model and came upon an exploit for a similar model version for remote code execution. The CGNM-2250 is vulnerable as well, for reference my software version is 4.5.8.20 with hardware version 1A. The input for the ping utility through the web interface isn't sanitized so you can enter arbitrary input. I discovered that it has a few basic utilities, including Dropbear.

 One of the servers that are at my disposal has a very low CPU usage percentage (if that makes sense). On my way to set up a PPTP VPN server on the box, I realized my router running pfSense could do it out of the box. In this short tutorial, I'll show you how to get a PPTP VPN working so that you can connect to it anywhere.

Head under VPN -> PPTP

Next, click on the Enable PPTP server radio button. For the Server address put in your WAN (public) IP. For the Remote address range, put in a local IP of which the range will start at. Near the end of the page, check Require 128-bit encryption.

^{Photo by gari.baldi}

With Ymas coming up, it makes me realize all the blogging I've done in the last year. I'm glad I got as much traffic as I did, surprised even. Anyway, here are some highlights of the last year or so.

Most viewed article: How I got Debian Lenny working on my Eee.

Debian is my favourite distro of all-time, so after getting it working on my Eee (which some people had problems with) I thought I'd write a post on it. And well, I did. Runner up is the Eee wallpapers that I made.

I recently swapped out my router (a PIII) running Smoothwall with pfSense. I'll say that I'm glad I switched. Anyway, what I found is that Smoothwall wouldn't let me add another LAN interface, making it a real router.

So, once you get pfSense installed, go to Interfaces->(assign) 

When I purchased my Linksys BEFSX41 I had two spare wireless routers a D-Link WBR-1310 and a WBR-2310 respectively. What to do? Turn them into wireless AP's (access points) of course! Increase your wireless coverage, look cool!

First thing's first, set up DHCP on your main router. For me it's the BEFSX41. Set your DHCP range, for example 192.168.0.150-199 giving you some room for wireless devices.





Now login to your router (most likely 192.168.x.1) which is converting to an AP, the WBR-1310/2310 for me. Turn DHCP off and set the router IP to below or above the DHCP range. So for example, 192.168.0.149, 192.168.0.200 etc.

A new router wasn't really necessary, but I thought I'd get one anyway. I ended up purchasing a Linksys BEFSX41. Pretty cool router, it includes a firewall and VPN end point. What I thought was (for some reason) that the router would act as a VPN server. That's not the case. I'd need to run a server in my LAN for it to be accessible WAN wide.

Since you could do a round robin setup with a DNS server, could you not do the same but with a web server?

I have two spare wireless routers, which are now AP's around the  house.

Comments or aaaanything at all are appreciated.