| My WA840G lost its mind I have a router/AP pair set up in WDS mode. Everything was fine for a couple of weeks. Today I turned everything on and the AP is gone missing.
A site survey indicates a new (another?) SSID on the channel i was using, 11 the default.
My first reaction was to jump to the conclusion that a neighbor set up a new mot wireless router or AP and the defaults were conflicting with mine. Well, no. As it turns out my AP had done a complete, total, absolute reset of itself back to factory defaults AND a DIFFERENT MAC address. Wha???
After wiring up to the AP at the default IP address and putting back all my settings everything works. (of course i had to put the "new" mac address into the router's wds list).
How can this be? A full reset (not that anyone did that anyways) shouldn't give a new mac address anyways -- should it?
By the way, the new MAC address is 00-0C-10-21-32-01.
These routers/aps normally have a prefix of 00-0C-E5. The 00-0C-10 is said to belong to a PNI Corporation, not Mot (possibly PNI makes a part that's inside my AP?)
Anyways, this is all too wierd. |
|
| Sounds to me, since you mentioned you were using "Factory Defaults" in your previous set up (I am assuming no security) that someone got into your WA840G and cloned a MAC Address to it. Pretty easy to do if you have security turned off... |
|
| no no. Before it lost its mind, i did have WEP going.
My mention of factory default is because it mysteriously returned to an IP of 192.168.40.1 with no wireless security.
For the sake of argument, let's say somebody did "crack" the WEP key, and logged in to the AP (using the default admin/motorola, i will admit  ) And did a factory reset through the web interface.
How would that explain a new, non-motorola prefix, MAC address?
I don't really feel like doing it just now but I assume the factory reset doesn't give a new MAC? ... Macs are meant to be "permanent" (i know that in reality they are just a few bits stored in nvram these days but, still)
Anyways, the notion that somebody cracked and hacked just that AP given the variety of wireless junk I've had running in this spot off and on for years is plausible but extremely unlikely. |
|
|
|
| You are correct, a "Factory Reset" should not affect the MAC... Like you said, the MAC prefix for this manufacture is 00-0C-E5 (some of the newer units have a different prefix)... Something weird happened... |
|
