1/23/2003
The good news:
If you live in Eastern North Carolina (BellSouth territory) and need a new DSL ISP, with affordable static IPs, I found one. Full speed that you got w/ DirecTV/Telocity (1.5 mbps downlink, 256 kbps uplink in my case), $55/mo, and no long-term contract. Service offered in Raleigh, Cary, Chapel Hill, Goldsboro, etc.. Call me at home (Cary) 1-919-481-0149, if you are interested.

The bad news:
Since DirectTV Broadband announced that they are getting out of the DSL business, I've been getting lots of emails from people who want to know their DirecTV/Telocity gateway passwords, in the hope of being able to do something useful with the hardware. Unfortunately, I don't know how to get it. I sweet-talked someone at DirecTV into passing mine to me "under the table" a long time ago. But, for no logical reason, they are apparently still unwilling to release the passwords, even now.

ModemAdminLogin:
My gateway administrative login id is "admin" (and so is yours, probably).

ModemAdminPassword:
My gateway administrative password is 8 characters long, including six lower-case letters and two numeric digits.

So you are unlikely to be able to find it with a brute-force attack -- it is too long for that. Assuming that they are all 8 characters long, and that each character can be either a lower-case letter or a digit, it would take 36**8 = 2,821,109,907,456 iterations to try them all. 2.8 trillion is a lot of iterations. There are only 60*1000*60*24*365.24 = 31,556,736,000 (31.5 billion) milliseconds in a year. So if you could try one password every millisecond (which I doubt), it would take you 89 years to try them all.

Someone at DirecTV has a database of these passwords, and the technical specs on the gateways. With those two bits of information, it might be possible to reprogram them to be good for something. But otherwise they'll all just become pretty Power-PC doorstops.

OTOH, that might be the best thing. The reason this web page exists is that the DIrecTV/Telocity gateways are notoriously unreliable. They crash a lot. That's why I had to build the "rebooter" hardware device. That's also quite possibly a major contributor to the demise of DirectTV Broadband.

There are two possible causes for that unreliability: hardware and software. If the cause is crummy software, then after you reprogram it to become a "normal" DSL modem it might be reliable. But if the cause is bad hardware, then it will always be unreliable. So, even if you managed to get the passwords and specs, and reprogram these things, you still might find that the result was an unreliable piece of junk, that you wouldn't want to use, and that you would be embarrassed to sell.

The bottom line: if these things were not so unreliable, and if I could get the passwords and specs (and, preferably, the current source code), and if I could get a customer list cheaply (to contact the folks who have these gateways), then I might take on the project. But they are, and I can't, so I won't.

If you decide to try it, please let me know. I hope you succeed and make a lot of money at it.

-Dave

___________________________________________________________________ 

From: dave146@burtonsys.com.nospam (Dave Burton)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.xdsl
Subject: Hardware device to power-cycle Telocity/DirecTV DSL gateway/modem with sync-no-surf problem
Date: 27 Mar 2002 08:23:50 -0800
Organization: http://groups.google.com/
Lines: 19
Message-ID: 
NNTP-Posting-Host: 66.57.12.194
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
X-Trace: posting.google.com 1017246231 28674 127.0.0.1 (27 Mar 2002 16:23:51 GMT)
X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com
NNTP-Posting-Date: 27 Mar 2002 16:23:51 GMT

Has anyone bought or built a hardware device to power-cycle the
Telocity/DirecTV "gateway" (DSL modem), when it hangs in a "sync no
surf" condition?  The idea is to run a script or cron job that
periodically checks the line status with pings or similar, and if the
gateway is dead and stays dead for more than a few minutes, then
automatically reset it by cycling its power under program control.

Here's a schematic for such a device (which I've not actually built):
[I did finally build it, and it works fine.  Here's a picture: rebooter1.jpg -DAB]

http://www.burtonsys.com/rebooter.gif

Or, does anyone know how to get the password needed to do a software
reset via:

http://10.5.1.2/admin?WINDWEB_URL=/fs/docs/admin/reboot/reboot.htm
[I eventually managed to get the password for my gateway "under the table" from someone at DirecTV. -DAB]

Thanks,
-Dave Burton
www.burtonsys.com