Sunday, August 18, 2013

RIP : My Modem

I woke up early this morning and noticed that all 4 LEDs from my modem has turned off. I didn't turn the modem off last night, so i tried to turn it off and on again, but it still went off. So i guess it's time to say good bye to my modem which has accompanied me for the last 3-4 years. It was a simple, yet nice modem so far, but lately, gets disconnected so often.

I already prepared the replacement since last month, so i just replaced it with the new one. It's quite cheap, but it has quite a lot of features. One thing i dislike about this new modem is that the original firmware has been modified by Telkom Indonesia (biggest telco operator in Indonesia) and they put a backdoor inside the modem. The reason was because to ease their job for troubleshooting. Suppose the client's modem was having a trouble, they can check it from their server or remotely change the configuration of the modem without user intervention.

For me, this is something unaccepted since it's not documented on the manual book and they don't even tell us about this. One of my colleagues have written a lengthy blog post about it on his blog (here and here). I have disabled the CWMP feature and disable all remote users and login along with other changes as well. For TP-Link users, you can try to use this reverse-engineering trick to get it done.

Anyway, the new modem is working fine here and hopefully it will last longer than the previous modem.

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