Computer Tech

Ghost Traffic aka Other Peoples’ BitTorrent Traffic aka It Wasn’t Me, Officer!

Published by on August 25, 2013 | Leave a response
Ghost Traffic aka Other Peoples' BitTorrent Traffic aka It Wasn't Me, Officer!

Earlier this week, HughesNet scheduled a maintenance outage to do whatever it is that they need to do for maintenance (which, in the past, has included replacing equipment damaged by golf-ball sized hail at the ground stations). When the connection came back up early the next morning, it was plagued by mysterious and intermittent RSTs on HTTP connections and 2% packet loss. Owch! Having approximately 320268309285049386509258 errands to run, I didn’t get to examine the connection until last night…

(more…)

HT1000 URL Parsing Vulnerability (now fixed!)

Published by on August 23, 2013 | 6 Responses

Disclaimer: This issue has recently (September-ish) been fixed by HughesNet (thank you!) in a firmware update to the HT1000 modem. I am reposting the old article for historical purposes.

The HT1000 modem has a configuration/status webpage called the “System Control Center” (SCC) at the IP address 192.168.0.1. Certain malformed URL within the SCC will cause an arbitrary command to be executed on the modem as an unprivileged user.

This security hole is related to the command to enable and disable Web Acceleration.

(more…)

Native HughesNet IPv6 on Linux

Published by on July 25, 2013 | 1 Response

HughesNet offers native IPv6 support (including routed prefixes) on their HT1000/HT1100 GEN4 systems. If you don’t know what IPv6 is, then fix yourself some tea, settle in, and skim through these primers on IPv6. It’s very nice to see that HughesNet is embracing the future of the Internet by allowing its customers to use IPv6 without having to configure a tunnel–most other ISPs don’t yet offer native IPv6.

(more…)

HughesNet FAQs

Published by on July 20, 2013 | 2 Responses

As a HughesNet customer, I frequent the HughesNet community support forums. There are some questions that I see asked very often there and elsewhere. Since the community forum has no sticky posts and the official knowledge base is woefully out of date, I compiled my own for prospective and current HughesNet GEN4 users.

HughesNet GEN4 Networking FAQ: Describes the HughesNet GEN4 HT1000 modem’s peculiar quirks and offers tips on integrating it into a home or small business network.

HughesNet GEN4 General FAQ: Anything else I could think of related to the GEN4 system.

They are a constant work-in-progress. HughesNet has released an HT1100 modem recently, but without getting my hands on one, I don’t know if it acts the same as the HT1000. If anyone has one of these modems and can verify or rebut a question in the FAQs, please get in touch with me!

Fun with a HughesNet HT1000 Modem, Part 1

Published by on July 17, 2013 | 13 Responses

Update: Whoops, I was wrong about the DNS cache. It apparently does allow you to specify your own nameservers on your router/computer without forcibly redirecting the query to HughesNet’s DNS servers. But the modem still caches the response and still offers no way to clear the cache.

Until recently, I had a dial-up connection. An aging Zoom 28.8k serial modem served as the gateway to the outside world for a farm of eight equally antiquated computers. This is too many computers fighting over an amount of bandwidth that is simply too small, no matter how it is divided up.

Early this year, my family switched to a HughesNet satellite connection. Soon we had a shiny HughesNet satellite dish in the yard and a sleek HughesNet modem—the HT1000 Satellite Modem—on my desk, ready to fling my packets into outer space like a digital catapult.

(Side note: in about 4.4 years, the signal will reach Alpha Centauri. What will the aliens there make of all our cat videos? Assuming there are aliens there, of course. But I digress.)

This would be great, or so I thought. Just hook it up to the network, configure the spare NIC on my old Linux box to accept a dynamic IP address, tell IPTables to masquerade all traffic through that interface. Nothing to it.

But the HT1000 is a fiddly beast. It doesn’t play nice with existing networking equipment for three reasons.

(more…)