Students and readers know that I love DD-WRT and open firmware. I love finding old routers and refurbishing the routers with firmware or hacks. Often I find a router that is not upgradeable by way of open source firmware. What I do is reset the routers, upgrade to the latest manufacturer firmware and then hunt the web for hacks or mods to the routers. Why? Refurbish the hardware and reuse these devices for labs (for my students).
The Netgear WGR614 v6 cannot be upgraded but you can enable telnet and get more commands and have more control of the router. You will first need an enable telnet program. The enable telnet program can be downloaded here.
- Login to Windows using an account which has administrative privileges (needed for sending custom crafted network packets which this tool does)
- Open a command line as an administrator (Type cmd in the Search box and right click on the cmd icon and Run as Administrator).
- Get the MAC address of your Netgear router. You can use either ‘arp -a’ and use the ‘physical address’ or look it up on the web interface of your router (Maintenance -> Router status -> LAN port –> MAC Address)
- Copy or type the MAC address to a text editor such as Notepad or Wordpad
- Remove any minus signs (-) or colons (:), replace all characters by their upper case representation (a = A, b =B etc.)
- Copy the result of your editing to the clipboard and return to the command line window
- type (without quotes) “telnetenable.exe“, the IP address of your router (e.g. “192.168.1.1“), add another space (“ “), paste the contents of the clipboard, and append ” Gearguy Geardog”. These are the default username and password for telnet console access (they differ from those of the web interface), you need to modify them appropriately if you changed them previously. The result should look similar to this:
telnetEnable.exe 192.168.1.1 YourMACAddress Gearguy Geardog
Correct character case is important here.
- Now press Enter to run the tool. It should return to the shell pretty quickly with no error. If it takes a long time and returns a ‘send failed’ error message try again and double check your entry
- Now login to the router via telnet from any computer in your local subnet (including the one you just used to activate the listening mode). To do so, type the following (no quotes): “telnet “, append the IP of your router and press enter (e.g. telnet 192.168.1.1) (You may have to add telnet under features in Windows 7 )
- You will be prompted for a login and a password. For the login, type Gearguy, for the password, type Geardog. Correct character case is important here.
- After successful authentication you will be presented a prompt such as
U12H02900>
- For available commands, type help or ?. To quit the console, type exit.
TCAT Shelbyville - ITIM 