Administration of Vodafone HG556 Router

Question:

I have a Vodafone HG556a router, which I was using while I was in Ireland with Vodafone network. This router has a USB port and as well as an ADSL port. So I thought that this router can be used back in India with BSNL or such other ADSL Networks in India. When I login to the router with the given default password, I could only see the basic settings and I could not see menu / options to setup the mac filtering and other advanced security settings. I searched google and figured out that there will be a different credential to get into the advanced settings. I tried with the default admin credientials but it does not work. Any help that you can offer here will be of great use for me.

By: Sreekumar Rajan


Answer:

Luckily, I too have a similar router and so I am sure I can help you here. Basically, these routers are locked with the network service providers and hence for any advanced setup, you may have to reach out to their customer service, who will be able to reconfigure your router remotely. Don't worry, there is a way to get the admin credentials and you do not have to reach out to the customer service team of Vodafone (overseas).


I assume that you have your basic user credentials. If not, you may perform a hard reset of the router and then look for the credentials
on the back of the router. Usually, the default basic credentials are mentioned in the router itself, if not you may consult the user guide if any that came with the router. The defualt user name is 'vodafone' and the default password is also the same - 'vodafone'. Refer the image, which is that of my Vodafone router and you can see the defaults printed there in.


You connect your router to your laptop or desktop using ethernet cable and login into the web administration of the router using the default IP of 192.168.0.1. Alternatively, you may connect through wifi as well, using the default SSID and the WPA as printed at the back of the router. Type the URL http://192.168.0.1/en_US/backupsettings.conf on the browser after logging in with the basic credentials.



This will prompt you to download the settings file and depending on your browser settings, allow the download into a desired location. This settings file is basically in xml format and so, you may open this using notepad or wordpad. Search for the word 'syspassword' and you will see the admin password as in this image. You may observe that the value for the key sysPassword in this case is "VF-456gIr". This is the password for the user 'admin'. Log out of the basic user login and then login again using the admin credentials as retrieved above and you are now on course to perform advanced setup tasks on your router.

It may be possible that the firmware version of your router may be different and in that case, there is a possibility that this technique might not work for you. If so, share with me more details about your router and I can see if some help is available elsewhere.

Glitch in Power Switch on the Desktop

Question:

The power switch on my desktop has developed some glitches. On a quick examination, I found that the switch mounted on a small board fixed on to the cabinet and this cabinet is an unbranded one bought in the grey market. I have doubts if the switch can be replaced or if the small board housing the switch will be available at all in the market. Is there a work around for this?

By: Anonymous

Answer:

There is no straight answer for your question, as the switch, the board housing the switch will greatly vary from the cabinet to cabinet. For example, some cabinets are designed to have the LED cluster integrated in the same board and the physical dimension of such boards vary depending on the position and layout of the cluster. The switch can certainly be replaced, but needs a physical examination. As such, you may get hold of a next door PC repair shop, who does chip level servicing and get this serviced.

Just in case if your PC is 4 or 5 years older, and depending on your usage, you may consider upgrading your PC and in the process, change the cabinet as well. If you think, you are fine with your PC and it has much life left over to serve you, you may try the following:

Open your cabinet and locate the front panel connectors and figure out the pins that are connected to your reset switch. Now, pull out your reset switch connector and plug onto the pins marked for power switch. You may also plug the power switch connector onto the reset pins. You may need to consult your mother board manual to do this right or else, things may go wrong and you may even you may brick the mother board or the processor. With this, you may use the reset switch to power on your system and your power switch will act as reset, if to the extent it works. With modern PC mother board designs, and the operating systems, the power off is in fact soft and thus you don't need the switch for powering off. This won't work if your PC is very old and the power switch is mechanical.

Unknown device on DELL XPS 13

Question:

I use a DELL XPS 13 Ultrabook. Though Windows 7 was the bundled operating system, I have upgraded to Windows 8. Though it all work fine, I see a device in device manager marked as unknown. The properties dialog lists the hardware IDs as ACPI\VEN_INT&DEV_33A0, ACPI\INT33A0 and *INT33A0. My attempts to search DELL driver download have failed as I could not find the appropriate driver. Can you help me find and fix this?

By: Rakesh Sharma

Response:

INT33A0 should be the port for Intel Smart Connect Technology (iSCT). Given that Windows 8 is designed as the OS for PCs and as well as smart devices, there is a need to use the communication components even when the device is in sleep mode. Intel's iSCT enables this feature and this feature is controlled by the System BIOS. Not all hardware may have support for this feature, but those that have the support would have a setting in BIOS to enable this capability. Just make sure, you may check out your BIOS and try disabling this feature and you may notice the 'Unknown device' disappear in the device manager.

The driver for this feature can be downloaded here on the Intel website. Try installing this component and see if your problem gets resolved. You may have to run the installer using 'Run As Administrator', even though the user account with which you have logged in has Administrator privileges.