Recently I've been testing my new out of the box Cisco E1200 router and its a story in itself.
First of all, I have to comment on the degradation of the service quality. Whoever makes these routers assumes shoe size IQ of the end-user. I had to throw out the CD that came with it, because they want you to be able to connect to the internet via modem. I don't really care for that, I just want to make sure that the router works, if it can connect 2 computers then it could probably work internet for them as well. Thank goodness I knew that default login/password are admin/admin and went straight to 192.168.1.1 through my browser and into the router settings. Plugged my old WinXP and my new Win7 computers into it and started thinking, "well, how do I make sure that it is working?" And here comes the first very interesting thing that happened.
If you read my previous articles then you know that I had Synergy installed on all of my computers so I can share my mouse/keyboard between them. The computers were originally connected to the wireless router downstairs, but for the purpose of the experiment I disabled wireless on both of them. With this in mind I tried to find the new router from my Win7 machine and it just didn't exist. Router didn't see the machine and PC didn't see the router, even though they are connected through a totally working CAT5. At this point my mouse swung to the left and onto the screen of my XP machine, causing my jaw to drop. "What the heck? The router is not working so how can it connect my Win7 and WinXP?" - thought I. Then I looked more in-depth at all my settings and here's the mystery:
Turns out Synergy server doesn't care much for IP's of clients, only Names. What happened is that I had my Win7 wired connection on a static setup in order to bridge my Debian system into the network. Same IP, but that's why the Win7 machine didn't really use DHCP from the router and didn't know it was there. At the same time router had no idea that something was plugged into it. WinXP machine on the other side used DHCP and was legitimately connected to the router. The Synergy client installed on it was sending broadcasts, shouting into the darkness looking for its mother-server, Win7 Synergy server got an incoming request from a completely new IP, but from a machine with the same name and let it connect.
This just shows that so far Synergy is quite insecure and shouldn't be used over the internet unless you want someone to be poking around on your computer very soon.
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