bt's homehub

Having last week moved to BT's broadband (from Be - who totally mucked
up their mail server; I'm not that impressed by BT now I've moved: from
fire to frying pan, I think ) I've been looking at the homehub 3
that came 'free'. I'm using my existing netgear for the broadband modem,
and so have been able to play with the HH3's PPPoE interface, that would
normally plug into their Infinity modem. I fancied using it to establish
a separate network for wireless on my LAN.

It's all working, more or less; but I'm very puzzled by the way the HH3
"phones home" - not to BT itself, rather to pbthdm.bt.motive.com which I
think is owned by Lucent. It seems to send some plain-text http stuff
containing the modem serial number and other configuration stuff; plus
some https traffic I've obviously not been able to analyze. Anyone know
what it's getting up to? I've got that server firewalled off for now!

(And it seems fairly unreliable, at least running with mpd5 as server -
LCP keep-alives seem to me there, and although it's currently working OK
as a WAP, I can't access the control web page, and it's not responding
to pings. That comes back though if I kill and restart the PPPoE server.)

 

The HH3 is worth roughly what you paid for it :-/
I was having to reboot mine about once a week to keep it behaving.

Swiched to an Asus N56U and current uptime is <checks> 229 days.

 

Before I got Infinity I checked it out; there's chat on the net to the
effect that it's the daily request for updates. I think that, on
balance, is probably a Good Thing and decided not to interfere with it.

Unreliable in the mode you're running it in, do you mean? Couldn't
speak about that. But in "normal" use I've found mine entirely
reliable; just sits there and works.

PS in this context; I've never been happy with IP addresses that stay
connected for weeks on end so I coded up a little Perl routine which
cycles the connection every night, which with BT's setup is pretty well
guaranteed to give you a new IP address. If anyone wants it send me a mail.

 

Maybe. I suppose they may think their code needs to be encrypted, I
guess; but it seems far too frequent for update checks. There again,
other rumours suggest information about the lan is being sent off, and
while that does seem a bit far-fetched, BT's reputation is far from
stainless.

Well, obviously, yes. But there's no reason that I can see for it to
hang periodically stopping access from its lan ports even if my PPPoE
server were faulty. And I'm using mpd5 which seems to be the preferred
software, so suspect the homehub.

I wonder why some have problems (cf 'Bill'), others not. Might it be
related to Infinity or adsl broadband options?

 

On 08/05/13 14:03, Mike Scott wrote:
....

Hmmm. I see what's happening. I'd had one of the 'normal' ethernet ports
hooked to my LAN, and given the homehub a suitable LAN address - that
all works fine.

But I then plugged the red 'Infinity' port into the same LAN. That
/ought/ not to cause an issue; but it looks to me as though that port
also responds to ARP requests for the box's LAN address - which it
shouldn't, and it then doesn't respond to IP input that gets sent there.
So depending on which MAC address they'd picked up, some machines would
and some wouldn't be able to talk to the hub. Definite hh3 bug if so,
although it only affects people who wire it up like this; which won't be
many