Being the I.T. person in the household, I usually can’t let something be attached to the home network without knowing what it is, what it does and how much control I have over it.

Our ISP provided an ONT device and a Wifi enabled AP connected to it. I configured the heck out of the AP, thinking I have full control over the device like I would a regular AP (with WRT loaded).

I was wrong.

I went through the configs of the device, got into a little trouble and for the first time ever decided to call the ISP for a little help.

We went through the steps, things weren’t working out, and the tech support person asked if they could reset it to its default status. Curious, I said sure! I was curious because I had altered the administrative username and password, and set the firewall settings to the highest possible settings. Suddenly the AP restarted and it was back to its freshly installed default settings!

Stunned, I asked how they did that. They said they couldn’t answer that by policy. Well.. Challenge Accepted!

This started my desire to replace the ISP Provided Actiontech R1000H devie with one of my own making! And then I went a bit further :) This is how it started…