Hacking the Actiontec 56k Modem/Gateway

william_lorenz writes "The Actiontec Dual 56k External Modem is an inexpensive device with a built-in 56k modem and two Ethernet ports that can be used as an Internet gateway of sorts. What's great about it is that it runs some form of uClinux, it's easily hackable, and Greg Boehnlein of the Linux Users Group of Cleveland and NOOSS fame recently contributed a detailed report on his findings! Pictures of the board are also available here, here, and here. Lots of specific details are included in Greg's article, and there's been some further discussions about this on the LUGC mailing lists."

Comments

56k gateways

[Sir Haxalot]

are almost pointless, a 56k connection is bad enough without it being shared across several computers.

Re:56k gateways

[zakezuke]

56k is better then nothing. Keep in mind also the fact that primarly text information gets compressed unlike in broadband technologies. Keep in mind that many a small business or small remote office doesn't nessicarly need lots and lots of bandwidth just to get e-mail.

Hackability? Well I'm somewhat curious what they can do with such a device. The first thing that comes to mind is a standby gateway that goes online when the primary gateway fails. This would be MOST handy.

Re:56k gateways

[MadX]

Hmm .. perhaps in your country. In South Africa, this is basically the standard .. sure you have ISDN / ADSL ..
BUT

ISDN - very expensive to start with (+- R2000-00 initial startup @ R 7.50 / $1) then you still pay for the call charges. If the config goes haywire you can end up with a bill of R 4000-00/month.
ADSL is only available in certain areas - but there is a 3gig monthly cap. some guys can go through that in a day if they wanted to, and the service is being oversubscribed so quickly that the transfer rates are becoming dysmal. The only advantage is the 24x7 online connectivity (although they say that this is not guaranteed)

So most subscribers pay for 56k access (and we do pay for every local call made)

Maybe once the monopoly is broken (ie: SNO) there will be some sort of relief for the south african public ..

Re:56k gateways

[nettdata]

are almost pointless, a 56k connection is bad enough without it being shared across several computers.

Almost, but they still have their uses.

I was the IT Manager for Lilith Fair, and when we sent the tour buses out on the road, 2 of them were dedicated accounting buses with LANs, printers, etc. We couldn't be guaranteed any kind of broadband connection at our stops, but we WERE guaranteed just about as many POTS lines as we could handle.

We set up two similar devices, one on each bus, and they were very simple for the non-technical accountants to use. It should also be mentioned that each device had 2 56k modems in it, and they attempted to do some sort of load-balancing or connection "stickiness" to take advantage of the dual connections.

They were perfect for sending and receiving emails, and even remote-faxing. We also used the same connection to synch up a couple of Oracle databases.

We quite liked them. (They weren't the same devices mentioned, but quite similar).

Nice machine

[jmorris42]

Looks like a nice machine with default software that is a bit lame. But since that is now easily fixable, I can think of a few folks in dialup hell that I'll probably be crossing off my Xmas list. :)

why not just buy a mini itx?

[Anonymous Coward]

although a bit larger, you can shove a mini itx board into just about anything. and you can have full on linux & routing capabilities.

possible to hack cable/adsl routers?

[narkotix]

Would it be possible to hack an adsl/cable router to be used as a simple webserver? For a low traffic and static site it would be perfect for my business website hosting needs. 10watts consumption...fanless operation...and small footprint it sounds like a dream! I could even imagine other hacks like interfacing a larger amount of flash storage or running a real low end db &scripting engine to have behaviour like mysql/php3 together.

Re:possible to hack cable/adsl routers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of them already run web servers. Linksys routers use a web interface for all the configuration and hardware setup. This is all hidden from the outside world (WAN port) unless the "remote administration" feature is enabled.

Performance is quite limited - my Linksys takes a few seconds to bring up the configuration page even when it's not busy routing traffic. It's unlikely that it would be able to provide a high enough quality of service for your business customers. It can barely handle basic dynamic content (the IP configuration), let alone any sort of database. This type of hardware is designed for switching packets, not producing HTML.

So it's a cute idea, probably do-able, but not worth it in practice. You'd be better off going with a cheap bare bones system running Linux or FreeBSD. No CD or floppy drive and underclock it to reduce power consumption.

Re:possible to hack cable/adsl routers?

[ls -lR]

My question is why? At the very best, you might be able to implement a very basic web server for static pages but forget about scripting or anything too advanced. It would be dependent on some server in your LAN for storage as well, so you'd still have to run a "real" server anyway. I think you overestimate the amount of processing power in those things. For not much more cost, just get one of those mini-itx boards and install FreeBSD or Linux. You'll get a modern, standards compliant server that can handle nearly any task and it can still be cheap and fanless.

Re:possible to hack cable/adsl routers?

[zakezuke]

So it's a cute idea, probably do-able, but not worth it in practice. You'd be better off going with a cheap bare bones system running Linux or FreeBSD. No CD or floppy drive and underclock it to reduce power consumption.

One thing I know i've discussed over a pint of beer are remote observation stations, trivial little devices that measure temprature, water level, that sorta thing. Out of the way places with NO easy access to landlines.

If you are talking off the shelf barebones system, you are talking a minium of 60watts for basic option. 10watts is a hell of alot more attractive if your power source is something like solar and battery storage.

NOT "dual modem" -- rather 1 modem, 2 users

[sonamchauhan]

The "dual modem" mention in the article header made me think for a moment this product allowed multiple users to share a composite link. (See my earlier post on this topic). Rather this product allows 2 users to share *one* link.

A composite link to two *different* ISP could be implemented quite simply by say, using a proxy server to multiplex outbound HTTP requests among multiple interfaces (each interface corresponding to one phone connection).

This approach is more coarse-grained and inefficient than TCP/IP-level channel bonding. However, it would still be useful for places out in the boondocks where you can get two telephone lines, but no broadband. Also, its efficiency could be improved by using HTTP functionality that allows specific byte-ranges to be downloaded for a particular resource.

I differ

[WindBourne]

I bought this the other day to use on networks for remote systems. One of the problems that you run into is being able to access a network when either the internet, the main server, or the firewall machine is out. This is very useful
In addition, I was thinking that this is the perfect device to load a hylafax on. For incoming faxes, I was thinking of using nfs v3 over tcp for the storage.

Compatability vs. Requirements

[Radical Rad]

They listed the device as compatible with:

Operating System Compatibility Windows 98 / 98SE / ME / 2000 / XP/ MAC OS 7.1 and higher/ Linux / Unix

But then for Minimum System Requirements they ask for:
Windows 98, 98SE, Windows Me, Windows 2000, or Windows XP

Is it necessary to have an ms Windows pc in order to configure the thing? What if all you have is Macintosh or, like me, Linux? Or are they saying that Windows is the bare minimum and, of course, anything else more than meets the requirements?