When it arrives to net connections, here in 2022 so many of us have it effortless. Our ISP supplies us with a fibre, cable, or DSL line, and we just plug in and go. It is develop into ubiquitous to the extent that lots of customers no extended use the analogue phone line that’s so usually portion of the bundle. But before there was simple access to DSL there had been leased strains, and it’s one of these that [Old VCR] is dissecting. The line in concern is a T1 connection good for 1.536 Mbit/s and mounted at terrific price tag in the times before his cable company offered reliable service, but in excess of a 10 years afterwards is now surplus to necessities. The ISP did not request for their router back again, so what else to do but give it the hacking cure?
In a lengthy website publish, he can take us by way of the specifics of what a T1 line is and how it is put in using two copper strains, prior to diving into the router alone. It’s an out of date Samsung unit, and as he examined the chips he located not the MIPS or ARM processors we’d hope from domestic gear of the interval, but a PowerPC SoC from Freescale. Connecting to the serial port reveals it as managing SNOS, or Samsung Network Functioning Process from an SD card, and some experimentation finds a default password reset procedure by the bootloader commands. The rest of the piece is focused to discovering this OS.
There was a time before the introduction of the Raspberry Pi and equivalent low cost Linux-able boards, that hacking a router was the way to get a affordable embedded Linux system, but now it’s a great deal a lot more done to liberate a router from the clutches of manufacturer and telco. Continue to, it’s really considerably nonetheless aspect of the prevalent fare right here at Hackaday.
