If you live in Italy (like me) and your ADSL is provided by Telecom Italia, then you probably got this wireless router as a welcome gift.
However lately my usual router stopped working and as I needed an immediate substitute, that gift came in my mind. When I started configuring it through its loveless GUI I felt confirmed in my aversion against it, however when you're willing to invest a bit more time into it you'll find more and more options present in Netgear or Fritz!Box routers, just badly presented in that awful GUI.
You can have DynDNS, Port-Forwarding, 256-WLAN-encryption, Print server via USB, ... so basically everything you need...
...Except one thing. By default your WLAN is called something like "Telecom-123456" which could be kind of distracting so that your computers will find 10 or more WLAN with almost the same name.
So, basically I had to change the name of it. Simple you guess? Me too, however there is no option to change the name of the WLAN in that GUI which was really surprising me, but there is a solution to that problem too.
Basically just create a backup of your routers settings using the GUI, which will be saved as something like "AGConfig20121212.kry". That one is an encrypted version of the settings which we are going to decrypt using the following command
openssl aes-128-cbc -K 65316532656263323039373831383630 -nosalt -iv 0 -d -in AGConfig20121212.kry -out AGConfig20121212.xml
In the XML then you can just search for the name of your WLAN and change it to a name you like it to be. After that we need to encrypt the changed file using the following command (note that "-e"(encrypt) now changed to "-d"(decrypt) and the filenames are in reversed order)
openssl aes-128-cbc -K 65316532656263323039373831383630 -nosalt -iv 0 -e -in AGConfig20121212.xml -out AGConfig20121212.kry
Now you can just restore your router with this newly created file (pay attention on your power supply during that action) and provided that you did not change any other values in the file, your router starts up in the same configuration as before just with a new SSID.
Thanks for this great info. I'm doing some research for my sister-in-law, who lives in Italy. She would like to use her Airport-Extreme as a wireless base station, and her Airport-Express to extend the network to the far-away rooms in her apartment. Is it possible to use the method you describe above to disable the wifi on the telecom-italia router?
ReplyDeleteOf course you can. You'll just nee d to find the right parameter in the settings file. However, there is a much simpler way for doing it which is via the visual interface of the router itself. The method here is interesting because the visual interface does not offer the possibility to change the SSID
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