Ambit Cable Modem: Disable Remote Configuration

I recently replaced a failing cable modem — the new one is an Ambit U10C109 Cable Modem. Plenty of configuration options provided you login with the admin:cableroot default username password, not the user:user one reported on the login page.

By default, remote configuration via HTTP and telnet servers is enabled.  Since I couldn’t find a web-based method to disable this (you can change the ports from the defaults, but that seems to be it), instead I logged into the telnet server and disabled it from there.  Here’s a transcript of the process (if you’ve changed the default port 64623, substitute your value in the telnet command below).

(Input in green, output in black, status fields of interest enhanced in italic)

$ telnet 192.168.0.1 64623
Trying 192.168.0.1...
Connected to 192.168.0.1 (192.168.0.1).
Escape charecter is '^]'.
Ambit U10C019 CableModem

login: admin
password: *********
>show telnet-access
Telnet Access Setting:
Local telnet access : Enable
Remote telnet access : Enable
Telnet Port : 64623

>show web-access
Web Access Settings:
Web Local Access : Enable
Web Remote Access : Enable
Http Port : 64680

>telnet-access remote disable
Disable telnet access from remote.

>web-access remote disable
Disable web access from remote.

>show telnet-access
Telnet Access Setting:
Local telnet access : Enable
Remote telnet access : Disable
Telnet Port : 64623

>show web-access
Telnet Access Setting:
Local telnet access : Enable
Remote telnet access : Disable
Telnet Port : 64623

>quit


Wrapper for vpnc

Here’s a small bash script wrapper for vpnc, the open-source VPN client for Cisco’s vpn concentrator. Put it in your path, and make sure you have an entry for you in your /etc/sudoers file (see comments in the script file for more info), and then connect, query status, or disconnect with:

vpn on
vpn status
vpn off

As noted in the script it might be just as easy to “vpnc” or “vpnc-disconnect” but this has the added bonus of reporting elapsed connection time.

Clinton in Concert?

Found an interesting juxtaposition in Yahoo!’s news RSS service, take a look:

 

Elton John, Secretary of State? Hillary Clinton live at the Palladium? You decide!

Kill the Android?

We’ve all seen plenty about the embarrassing Android OS bug that passed all input text to a root shell. Suggestions abounded that texting reboot followed by <Enter> is all it takes (or took, before the patch was rolled out) to reboot the phone.

I don’t have a T-mobile G1 so I can’t test this, but I’m curious, what if instead of reboot you entered:

rm -rf /

If you’ve got an unpatched G1 and you try this, I’d love to know what happens!

Come on, someone must have tried this…..

Flock 1.1.4

I’ve finally found a reason to try out Flock, having a WordPress blog and all that.  I thought this easy one-click blog stuff was just gimmicky but it’s actually pretty sweet.   Write, publish, easy. A Mozilla-based browser engine doesn’t hurt either.  Ok WebKit would be ok too.  IE?  Surely you jest sir!

Blogged with the Flock Browser