சுதர்சன் சாந்தியப்பன்

During Raining Days, BSNL broadband line gets little noisy. I used to connect only my router and never my land line phone in the phone line as I use the BSNL telephone line only for Internet access. Lately, I noticed that the Netgear router having difficulty in establishing connection with the BSNL server whenever it was raining or the phone line is noisy. The “i” indicator keeps blinking in ORANGE color and never stabilizes into a GREEN color indication. Having the “i” indicator blink made sure that the link exists. When I wanted to check the condition of the link (telephone line connection), I connected the BSNL telephone to the splitter port which splits the telephone line to the router and the telephone. When I lifted the cradle, I could notice that the telephone line is little noisy. When I was wondering when and how to make the complaint to BSNL, surprisingly the Netgear router made a stable connection with BSNL gateway. I have used this hack several times, whenever the router (modem) had difficulty in establishing connection.

One theory behind this could be the “loading” effect of the telephone on the telephone line which is subsiding the noise ripples coming over the telephone line.

I have a super-fast (by today’s standards) broadband connection provided by BSNL. But BSNL had provided me a wired ADSL router, which has only one RJ45 Ethernet port. I have two desktops and one laptop with me which needs to be connected to the Internet through the broadband connection. BSNL also provides a wireless type 2 ADSL modem, but the general review about that is not so appreciable. Lately, I was told about Netgear DG834G which could be used for my rescue.

I bought Netgear DG834G from Ritchie street, Chennai for Rs 2900. This is a type 2 modem that comes with IEEE 802.11b/g hardware that can support upto 54Mbps data transfer speed and four 10/100Mbps Ethernet ports. The configuration of the modem is pretty straight forward. I had chosen the manual ADSL configuration method in setting up. I had all the details borrowed from the UTStarCom modem given by BSNL. A quick summary of the modem setting is as follows:

ADSL Setting

VPI: 0

VCI: 35

Multiplexing Mode: LLC BASED

DSL Mode: ADSL 2+

Basic Settings

Does your Internet connection require a login? YES

Encapsulation: PPPoE

Login:

Password:

Service Name: dataone

Idle timeout: 5

Internet IP Address: Get Dynamically from ISP

Domain Name Server: Get Automatically from ISP

Network Address Translation: Enable

There was a catch here. I did not know the BSNL password. From the ADSL modem, I could get only the username. So I tried using “password revealer” to get the password configured in the BSNL modem (I got the modem pre-configured while BSNL installed it in my home). None of the
password revealers work on XP and Vista.

Linux Fedora came for the rescue. Fedora comes with Ethernet promiscuous mode intercepting
tools like “tcpdump”, “iptraf” etc. I decided to intercept the ADSL modem configuration page for capturing the password which “could” be sent as plain text in the URL. TCPDUMP becomes an ideal tool for this requirement. I summoned “tcpdump” to capture all the packets destined to 192.168.0.1 (ADSL router IP). The command is the following:

tcpdump -A dst host 192.168.0.1 -s 5000 > dump.file

I had asked the command to redirect the outputs to “dump.file”, so that I can check the content offline. Once the command started, I opened the ADSL page in my browser (on a machine connected to ADSL via ethernet; also to remind, “tcpdump” runs on this machine!). While browsing
through the authentication page and the following pages, “tcpdump” started capturing all the html text transferred between my machine and the ADSL router.

Bingo, the URLs are dumped in the file. To my surprise, the password assigned for my BSNL account was “password”. Later, I figured out that “password” is the default password assigned
to all pre-configured ADSNL modems. Anyways, even if the password is different, my technique would have fetched the password for me.

This technique will not work for sites like yahoo, etc. Because they don’t send the password as plain text, rather they send the MD5 hash equivalent of the password. This technique will not work for any site that is running on HTTPS, as everything sent across or received is encrypted using 128bit SSL encryption.

Netgear DG834G promises reasonable signal strength for 35M (~100feet). It works even if I keep
the router is one corner of the house and try to access it from any other place out of which some areas are reachable only after multiple left and right turns.

DG834G is awesome. I recommend this router for domestic BSNL broadband use.