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Because Everyone (Still) Needs a Router

codinghorror.com

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Re: Because Everyone (Still) Needs a Router

#71

Post by awakeasleep »

orbitingpluto wrote: post #63

Running Linux? Avoid any ASUS routers unless you're flashing a new firmware. Awful experience. My last one was the N15. It wouldn't even give out a DHCP lease to two different computers and four different NICs. And, as for: "Ever sat in an internet shop, a hotel room or lobby, a local hotspot, and wondered why you can't access your email? Unknown to you, the guy in the next room or at the next table is hogging the in…

Can you explain any more about how this works?

I'm assuming you find someone with a high random port open, but I have no idea where to go from there.

How would you go about flooding that connection? Are you relying on a card in passive mode to gather data and replay it? What do you use to replay?

Re: Because Everyone (Still) Needs a Router

#72

Post by dereg »

mcteapot wrote: post #68

I have been burned by so many routers in the past few years. It is amazing how terrible the factory firmware is on these machines. For most of them I have had to install DD-WRT just to get them working. Thank the flying spaghetti monster for open source. But what I dont understand is why hardware manufactures go out of there way to prevent external software from being installed.

Most companies lock you into their own firmware because it'd be prohibitively expensive to provide customer support for all the alternatives out there.

Re: Because Everyone (Still) Needs a Router

#73

Post by yourapostasy »

orbitingpluto wrote: post #63

Running Linux? Avoid any ASUS routers unless you're flashing a new firmware. Awful experience. My last one was the N15. It wouldn't even give out a DHCP lease to two different computers and four different NICs. And, as for: "Ever sat in an internet shop, a hotel room or lobby, a local hotspot, and wondered why you can't access your email? Unknown to you, the guy in the next room or at the next table is hogging the in…

I'm seeing more hotels' providers go to private VLANs so in those cases I can't see how such a DoS attack will work any longer. Hopefully, if the provider is sophisticated enough to set up a private VLAN for each room or WiFi connection, they can write the rules for enforcing QoS on the uplink.

Re: Because Everyone (Still) Needs a Router

#74

Post by tempuser007 »

wut42 wrote: post #46

In France, this need have been killed by the ISP themself. Is there any ISP in the US who does that ? Free (a ISP) started in 2002. It's a home-made modem router, who also does TV and Phone. Since that almost all others French ISP have created their *box (Livebox, BBox, AliceBox, Neufbox, …).

I have freebox too but I still use a linksys wrt54g router with Tomato behind their router (which can be disabled btw) and I have great results. No resets, no slowdowns, uptime is very high and the wireless works well enough for my needs. There might be a little bottleneck in the wifi cause the chip is a bit older but it compensates with the fact that is very reliable. So I would recommend Tomato and Linksys over any ISP provided router.

Re: Because Everyone (Still) Needs a Router

#75

Post by JshWright »

ShabbyDoo wrote: post #17

I posted this "Ask HN" awhile back about my desire to pay for a router-as-a-service: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1160585 What surprised me was the number of responses along the lines of "you don't need this -- just install DD-WRT, OpenWRT, whatever and configure the foo,bar, and baz features as such." I'm likely in the 99th percentile of the US population in my ability to do such a thing, and I still have to…

Buffalo ships a router with DD-WRT preinstalled.

http://www.buffalotech.com/products/wireless/wireless-router...

I'm using the 'stock' DD-WRT firmware on mine, and it handles its duty as a VPN endpoint, a Tunnelbroker endpoint, and does significant QoS'ing without a problem.

Re: Because Everyone (Still) Needs a Router

#76

Post by matthew-wegner »

orbitingpluto wrote: post #63

Running Linux? Avoid any ASUS routers unless you're flashing a new firmware. Awful experience. My last one was the N15. It wouldn't even give out a DHCP lease to two different computers and four different NICs. And, as for: "Ever sat in an internet shop, a hotel room or lobby, a local hotspot, and wondered why you can't access your email? Unknown to you, the guy in the next room or at the next table is hogging the in…

Or just offer to help the coffeeshop owner replace their router with something better. I replaced the router at my coffeeshop. They're happy to have the help!

There are Tomato variants that offer per-user bandwidth caps. Check the Toastman build: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomato_(firmware)

Re: Because Everyone (Still) Needs a Router

#78

Post by imrehg »

scoot wrote: post #66

Do any of these have built-in VPN? And which services can I use it with? I'd like to be able to configure a VPN at the router, and not have to think about whether the software is compatible with, installed in and used by all the software on my devices. Any suggestions?

Most of these have OpenVPN in it, some can use it either as client or server as well.

Re: Because Everyone (Still) Needs a Router

#79

Post by SkyMarshal »

orbitingpluto wrote: post #63

Running Linux? Avoid any ASUS routers unless you're flashing a new firmware. Awful experience. My last one was the N15. It wouldn't even give out a DHCP lease to two different computers and four different NICs. And, as for: "Ever sat in an internet shop, a hotel room or lobby, a local hotspot, and wondered why you can't access your email? Unknown to you, the guy in the next room or at the next table is hogging the in…

>Running Linux? Avoid any ASUS routers unless you're flashing a new firmware.

Good to know, thanks, thought that was what the entire article was about - buy a commodity router (or hardware in general) and flash it with new and better firmware.

Re: Because Everyone (Still) Needs a Router

#80

Post by orbitingpluto »

awakeasleep wrote: post #71
orbitingpluto wrote: post #63

Running Linux? Avoid any ASUS routers unless you're flashing a new firmware. Awful experience. My last one was the N15. It wouldn't even give out a DHCP lease to two different computers and four different NICs. And, as for: "Ever sat in an internet shop, a hotel room or lobby, a local hotspot, and wondered why you can't access your email? Unknown to you, the guy in the next room or at the next table is hogging the in…

Can you explain any more about how this works? I'm assuming you find someone with a high random port open, but I have no idea where to go from there. How would you go about flooding that connection? Are you relying on a card in passive mode to gather data and replay it? What do you use to replay?

nmap is smart enough to determine what service is being offered on a given port and what OS is running.

The above combined with the offending computer usually being a Mac and it's named something like "Bob Smith's Computer" is enough to common-sense narrow it down within a minute or two without having to use passive mode.

(Also with the repeat offender I kept his MAC handy.)

Then just initiate as many TCP connections as you can a la Python or whatever is handy.

(of course your mileage may vary with this approach such as when clients are isolated from communicating with each other.)

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