Primrose's Blog

I hate ISP provided routers with a passion. They're always locked down, bloated, and always allow the ISP to remote into my fucking gateway.

I know that this is mainly for remotely assisting with any issues a customer may encounter, or for remotely upgrading firmware on the router, as my ISP does. For most people, especially residential customers, this is a very good thing. But, as someone who knows more than her fair share of networking stuff, this has become an annoying pain to deal with.

What makes this worse for me is that I don't have a static IP address at home, nor do I have an option to as a residential customer, so when my ISP decides to remote into my router, upgrade it's firmware, and reboot it, I get an entirely new WAN IP address, which is a pain in the ass, because since I host a web server from home, it means that I have to go into my registrar's DNS configuration and update my A record, which can be really annoying once you've had to do it enough (I know that you can use things like dynamic DNS to ease this issue, but my stupid ISP router doesn't support custom dynamic DNS providers, and I don't want to use any of the ones that are pre-selected for me in the web interface).

Hell, I can't even close off the ports that are used for remoting into my gateway, since the firewall is very basic and only allows for custom allow inbound rules, not deny rules.

As a network administrator at home, i'm just not okay with my ISP having remote access to my gateway, arguably one of the most crucial parts of my network. I'll be rectifying this issue soon enough though, so stay tuned.

Signed,

Primrose