Right after the last post, I had to break out the old Dell laptop again – so I figured I’d do a quick post that kind of illustrates a typical day for the Wizard…
I have a client here at work that makes an internet connected thingy – which really narrows it down I know – and they do a lot of their app-to-device QA over in one of my labs. Normally this QA is sanity checking on various mobile devices to make sure the UI works at whatever the new screen resolution is or that the app works as intended in whatever the new OS version happens to be.
But occasionally we help them recreate problematic scenarios reported by their customer service, and the current problem is a couple of specific home routers that aren’t working for their onboarding process.
One of these routers is the base model Eero, which is Amazon’s in-house wifi router and isn’t a big deal to replicate – other than the Eero setup wanting your location, email, phone number, blood type, and a copy of your family tree to set up the mandatory online account to activate the damn thing…
The other two are proprietary “Technicolor” wifi routers commonly supplied by Comcast for their broadband service – and that’s the reason I’m involved…
The two proprietary routers were fairly cheap on ebay, but aren’t real happy about operating outside of Comcast’s network and expect their WAN side to be supplied by coax.
I was getting ready to build a DOCSIS test network using an old Arris C3 and a selection of open sorcery (DHCP, TFTP, NTP, Syslog, and this), but I was eventually able to convince these routers that their WAN connection was being provided on an ethernet port by ONT (Optical Network Terminal) instead of coax.
This still requires a lot of hand-holding to get the routers to understand what they are talking to, and due to these requirements a separate test network was needed…
To set up this test network I needed a local router to talk to my edge router, and for small scale test networks that aren’t doing performance testing I like to use the venerable Cisco RV042 because it’s rock solid and super flexible, and lets me do things like supply custom DCHP flags… But once again no modern browser will talk to the web server in the RV042 because it’s more than two years old.
So I had to drag out the Dell XPS again, and ten minutes later had reverse engineered Comcast’s provisioning strategy well enough to sufficiently emulate it for these two routers… And tomorrow we’ll do the testing to try and determine if it’s the router, wifi, or Comcast that shuts down the client’s onboarding.
And that’s why they pay me the big bucks. 🙂
Listening to "In the Air Tonight" by Phil Collins