On March 2010, Telekom Malaysia Berhad (TM) launched its High Speed Broadband (HSBB) service, called ‘UniFi‘. TM’s UniFi high speed broadband packages comprises services of high speed Internet, video (IPTV), and phone, with speeds of 5 Mbps, 10Mbps and 20Mbps.

Upon sign up, the customer will receive 4 pieces of equipment:

• Fiber Broadband Termination Unit (BTU), ie. where you connect the fiber optic cable into.
• WiFi router (D-Link, D-615 with custom firmware), which is plugged into the fiber BTU.
• Set-Top box for IPTV and VoD, which will plug into the WiFi router.
• DECT phone plugged into the Fiber BTU.

I’m not going to rant about the UniFi or TMNet’s services, nor speed, nor the much debated bandwith cap that TM said they’re going to impose.

I’m going to talk about the security (or the lack thereof) of the default WiFi router setup.

Once the customer signed-up for UniFi services, the TM’s technician will do all the equipment installations in your premises/homes for you. Nice, BUT, the default WiFi router setup done by the technicians has very low security features:

• The router is not configured to drop ICMP packet, making an attacker able to ping those unprotected routers, telling him it’s alive and connected to the internet.
• The firewall is disabled.
• The router has remote access enabled. Making it worse, it has no authorised IP filter (has default config of 0.0.0.0, meaning anybody, anywhere, can log in to your router web interface). The web interface port number are also set to default.
• And the BIGGEST, BADDEST flaw: The router’s Administrator password is still the default ones!!

With the default configurations as above, even a child with a web browser sitting miles away could go into your routers!! I’ve done this personally, where I can easily scan a range of UniFi’s IP addresses, and log on to their routers.

I understood if the above setup is to ease TM’s effort to do some troubleshooting/support remotely for their customers. However, The least they can do is change the default administrators password for the WiFi routers! Change the password to something unique for each customer. They still can keep records of the users router’s password if they need to do troubleshooting/support purposes remotely.

Not all TM’s customers are technically savvy to secure their own home networking. So, the purpose of this article is to share/educate/guide some basic protection for your home network.

Secure your home network:

Login in to your router’s web interface. Open a web browser, go to http://192.168.0.1 . You will be prompt for admin username and password. Open your D-Link Router manual for more info.

1. Change your Router’s Administrator password.

• Go to ‘Maintenance’ tab, under ‘Admin Password’ section. Rename your password there.

2. Rename your Wireless Network Name/ SSID.
The default SSID has the customer’s name, i.e.: myfirstname@unifi. This possible could leads to privacy issues, as outsiders knows who’s using what ISP services (UniFi, Streamyx, etc).

• Go to ‘Setup’ tab, click ‘Wireless Setup’ menu on the left.
• Under ‘Multiple Wireless Network Name (SSIDS)’ section, click ‘Multiple Wireless Network Name Setup’ button.
• You will be taken to a page with ‘Wireless Network Name’ section. Rename your existing Wireless Network Name/SSID there.

3. Disable Remote Access to your router.

• Go to ‘Maintenance’ tab, under ‘Remote Management’ section. Un-check ‘Enable Remote Management:’ check box.

4. Enable Firewall

• Go to ‘Advanced’ tab, click ‘Firewall & DMZ’ menu on the left.
• Under ‘Outside Firewall Setting’ section, checked the ‘Enable WAN to LAN Firewall :’ check box.
• Then, checked all the check box inside the rows of ‘DOS ATTACK’, ‘POST SCAN ATTACK’ and ‘SERVICE FILTER’.
• To find out what all these settings do, feel free to Google each of the check box descriptions.

Few suggestions to TM, I strongly recommends that the technicians doing the UniFi’s installation, increase some level of customers home networking security. The very basic they can do is to change the WiFi routers default administrator’s password upon installation, and keep that password if they need to do troubleshooting/support purposes remotely.

Be safe.

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I have no problem running 720p .mkv HD video files. No lagging, no dropped frames whatsover. However, when running 1080p .mkv files, especially those big sizes full-HD Blue Ray medias, I have:
- Lagging,
- Dropped frames,
- 100% CPU utilizations.

It doesn’t matter if I’m using VLC, or Totem Movie Player, it will always have those problem above. From what I’ve read, this is probably due to FFMpeg codecs for H.264 decoding.

However, I have a solution, found from http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1037625

Below are the steps:
1. Install mplayer:
sudo apt-get install mplayer-nogui

2. Run your 1080p .mkv files with it:
mplayer -vo vdpau -vc ffh264vdpau /path/to/the/mkv/file

Now the HD movies playing in my Ubuntu laptop are smooth as it can be.
Try it out. Cheers.

1. How to Check for Open Ports in Ubuntu There are various ways to view for open ports on...

All the unread mails in your inbox, of course.

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A: Cameron Highlands.

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I like his name, very Web 2.0.

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But then, it’s human nature to get upset with the things that people do …

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At the toll plaza the other day, I handed over my money to the toll booth operator and waited for the boom to be raised. It was taking a bit too long so I glanced at the guy. He was hunched over the till, shuffling small pieces of paper; it then occurred to me that I had given him RM50.60 instead of RM1.60.

So please. Be careful when proffering money in the dark. Because of the similarity of the new RM50 note to the RM1 note, you might be giving more than you should.

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Open your command prompt, and type:
netstat -an | grep "LISTEN "

Or, another method:
sudo netstat --tcp --udp --listening --program

It will list all ports that your machine are listening to. The latter method will even shows the program name associated to it.

Enjoy.

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Then, I’ve found Conky. I’ll never turn back.

This is the best system monitor I have ever experienced. It is highly customizable, all you have to do is modify the Conky config file. There’s a lot of widgets/variables to use, such as system monitoring tools (CPU, RAM, SWAP, Hard Drive, etc), batteries capacity, networking, and more. And best of all, it is very, very easy to create your own widgets. If you know any programming language such as Python, Perl, or even a simple Shell Scripts, then you’re off to create your own.

Installing Conky are easy as executing command below in the terminal:
$ sudo apt-get install conky

Next, create your Conky config file. Here is my config file I’m currently using.

Then, execute command below to run Conky. Put it in your startup so that it will be running each time you boot-up your computer:
$ conky -c <path_to_my_conky_config>.conf

Below are what my desktop currently looks like with Conky:

Conky Desktop

In there I’ve created my own GMail notifier, Google Reader notifier and local TV guide, all using Python. You will find more ideas, screen shots and scripts to use with Conky on Ubuntu Forum.

Cheers.

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