On Thu, 2010-05-06 at 12:58 -0600, Petrus de Calguarium wrote: > I just called my internet provider (who supply the router with my > monthly subscription). It turns out that the only way to get rid of an > old computer on my network and free up a previously used IP address is > to reset the device and reconfigure the whole thing, including > wireless setup, access control, the whole 9 yards. Hmm. what a crappy device. Tell us what it is, so the rest of us can reject buying/accepting one of them. It's also possible the advice is wrong. They may not want to give you lengthy help, so they just give out simplistic advice. Or they just simply don't know what they're talking about. Many routers have two reset options. Quickly pressing a reset key will reset the hardware, but keep the old settings (rules you've manually set should stay, but it should lose automatically assigned addresses). And holding in the reset button for a number of seconds doing a hard reset of everything. Some router also have a telnet command line interface, which may offer different options than configuring it through a web page. Another approach is to do it at the computer. Have your computer connect with the address you want to lose, then issue a DHCP release command. As far as your neighbour being connected, you could try the same release trick. Though, if you secured your router, like you should do, then they can't connect. Once you let a strange in they can do all sorts of damage, whether accidentally, or on purpose. Everything from messing with things on your computers, to doing illegal things in your name. I've seen at least one wireless router (D-Link DIR-300) that comes, as default, with no security. So your first set of configuring exposes all your settings to anyone snooping, including passwords (because they're all sitting in the HTML source code of the web page configuration, and will be transmitted in the clear when it sends you a page, and when you submit form data). About the only way around it is to turn it on, connect up with a cable, do not set private settings (usernames and passwords), log in with the default password, turn off wireless, save settings and reboot it to be sure that wireless has actually turned off right now, turn on encryption security settings, configure it and put in your private credentials, save your settings and reboot to be sure that it actually is in a secure operating mode before you turn on the wireless, turn on wireless, save settings, and reboot to check everything works as expected when the device is cold started. (The rebooting, on some devices, is necessary because although you might have saved settings, they're not always acted upon until the device is rebooted. They must have been designed by a Windows user who's so used to rebooting all the time that they don't know how annoying that is to everyone else who's used better things that don't need it.) All in all, it's ridiculously convoluted chain of events! I've also seen devices that expose all your settings to the internet, because their configuration web server answers to all queries on any interface. If the user left the default password on the device, as many people do, you can log in and see their ISP logon credentials. I found one of them, a few years back, when I was checking out whether my router was badly designed in that way, and accidentally typed in the wrong IP address, connecting to someone else rather than my system. It's no wonder the internet is so full of crap when there's so many badly designed devices and operating systems, never mind the clueless users... -- [tim@localhost ~]$ uname -r 2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686 Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists. -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
