Dissecting FON

Buffalo FON: Wireless High Power DSL Router WHR-HP-G54

End of july 2006, a friend told me about a special offer of a wifi router. The router did not have installed the usual firmware, but a special one to connect to the FON network. The information I read on the FON homepage sounded very interesting. Since the router was offered for only €30,- at that time and is supported by OpenWRT, I spontaneously decided to buy one. Unfortunately the special offer is over meanwhile, so you have to pay the usual price of €60,- for it.

After receiving my new router, I exchanged my Linksys WRT54-G with it. The setup is completely fool-proof (as long as you do not try to understand how it works, you will not have trouble with it). After registering the new router by simply logging into my FON account over the wifi interface of it, I could change the routers password for the root account. After a restart I could log in into the router as root via ssh. 

hpbock@sputnik:~$ ssh root@192.168.10.1
root@192.168.10.1's password: xxxxxxxxx


BusyBox v1.00 (2006.06.23-17:10+0000) Built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

 _______  _______  _______
|   ____||       ||   _   |
|   ____||   -   ||  | |  |
|   |    |_______||__| |__|
|___|

 FON Firmware (Beta 0.6.6) -------------------------
  *
  * Based on OpenWrt - http://openwrt.org
  * Powered by FON - http://www.fon.com
 ---------------------------------------------------
root@OpenWrt:~#

As anyone can see in the welcome message, the routers firmware is based on OpenWRT. By googling around and surfing through some blogs and forums I noticed, that you can even download the complete sourcecode for the FON firmware.

In the next sections I am going to dissect the FON firmware by stepping through the different software packages run during startup. Then I will have a closer look at the system configuration, exspecially of Chillispot, which seems to be the software package that manages the access to the internet connection on the wifi side. Finally I will try to extend the FON firmware to provide access for IPv6 adresses via 6to4 on the lan side.

To be continued...