Remotely access the O2 Wireless Box

[sharp]

Hi all, thank you for taking the time to help.

I have been an O2 broadband customer for a couple of months now, and everything has been pretty good, except I cannot figure out how to access my O2 Wireless Box II from outside of the LAN.

When I was with BT, I could access the BT Home Hub by simply typing the external IP address into a browser.

Is this possible with the O2 box?

Many thanks,

Chris

[Tony1044]

From memory (not in front of it - can try to check this evening), it's in the toolbox -> remote management settings?

You can also enable external telnet - I posted a howto on here some time back.

[Abhishek@o2]

Hi sharp,

The ability to remotely access your O2 wireless box from an external source is not available with our routers. This is something we have disabled for security purposes.

There's no way to manage or enable remote telnet access to our router on the router configuration pages.

Abhishek

[Tony1044]

But you can do it from the CLI, no?

[Abhishek@o2]

Yes, you can enable this via the CLI however this is something that we don't support. The reason behind this is that by opening the router up in ways you're talking about, it would expose the router to potential security risks. So I would suggest not to access via this way.

Abhishek

[Tony1044]

Hmmm....so being pedantic, you are saying you ship routers that can be made unsecure by enabling a feature programmed into them?

To be honest I don't see how it's adding to the attack profile - by default the firmware doesn't allow any of the inbuilt accounts to access via telnet - you have to create a new one, and with that process you should be creating an equally strong password.

If you have the know-how to get into the CLI of a router, create an account, enable Telnet and allow said user access to it, one would assume you are also savvy enough to understand things like complex passwords?

Actually - why are the Thomson routers the choice of O2? They seem absolutely terrible for gaming and I think you'll find most of the users of this site have binned them to use, say, a Netgear (most probably a reflashed Sky one).

Just take a look through the posts here and you'll see complaint after complaint about PS3 and XBox connectivity problems.