[Techtalk] Router issue

Mike kenziem at sympatico.ca
Wed Jan 6 02:59:55 UTC 2010


On December 3, 2009, Kathryn Hogg wrote:
> Adelene Dawner wrote:
> > That decision bit me in the butt earlier this week when someone else
> > apparently decided to set up security for me, on my wifi. I don't know
> > who did it, or the password that they used, or anything else of
> > interest in that direction, but I know that it's my personal wifi
> > that's affected, because when I manually turn wifi off at the router,
> > the secure signal that I'm looking at goes away. (Needless to say,
> > I've been keeping it off - if I can't use my wifi, nobody's going to.)
> >
> > How can I fix this? I assume I can still communicate with the router
> > via the PC, but I haven't done so before - a friend helped me get the
> > router set up the first time, and my main PC used Windows at that
> > point. A quick google tells me that I might be able to completely
> > reset the router, but I assume I'd have to set it up again from
> > scratch if I did that, and I'd rather avoid that if I can - I get my
> > 'net from Verizon, who gave me quite a hard time about using a
> > third-party router when it was first set up, and I'm not looking
> > forward to dealing with that again to get the information I'd need.
> >
> > The router in question is a netgear dgn2000.
>
> Go to one of the wired PC's and check their default route.  On linux run
>
> $ netstat -nr
>
> Look for the line with the Destination column of 0.0.0.0  Then under the
> gateway column you should have the ip address of your router.  Mine is
> 192.168.0.1
>
> You should be able to access a web interface by pointing your web browser
> to that address.
>
> It's possible that whomever "secured" your wifi also set an admin
> password.  If so, you may have no other choice than to do a hard reset.
> This is usually accomplished by sticking a paper clip or something into a
> little hole marked reset somewhere on the unit.  If that's the case, you
> will need to reconfigure all your ISP settings.
>
> > Information on how to secure the wireless once I have it back would
> > also be appreciated, though I'm sure I can find that myself if I look.
>
> The first thing you should when you have access to it is to set the admin
> username/password to something other than the default.
>
> Then to secure your wifi, I would recommend using WPA.

I'd go with the hard reset.  There's no telling what other settings they may 
have changed.

As for  security,  I just cracked a wpa2 with a weak 9 letter password (all 
lower case, 2 words combined)  in just over 2 weeks.   So make sure you use 
mixed case, numbers and special characters, and avoid dictionary words.

I also turn off the SSID broadcast.


-- 
Collector of vintage computers http://www.ncf.ca/~ba600



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