So I’d forgotten the admin password. I needed to setup port forwarding so my client can see their mini-server. I thought, how am I going to change stuff without the password. After reading around for a bit it seemed the only option was to reinstall the firmware.

This didn’t go according to plan and by five o'clock last night I had just a shell of a router that would not respond to any commands. Normally these things can be administered through a serial port if all else fails, but the key combination to boot into emergency prompt mode wasn’t working. This morning that very much confused the guy I spoke to at technical support.

However, one thing did work, the key combination to boot over BOOTP. So armed with a PDF explaining what was I required, I found BOOTP and TFTP servers for Windows and managed to rebuild the whole system over ethernet. That was cool, I’ve never done that before.

Then of course the configuration interface went into treacle mode. It’s taken me the best part of an hour just to configure the ADSL, DHCP, NAT and DNS. No idea why. Now it’s fixed though and I couldn’t really care any more.

I think I might read my email…