I have a "Corinex Detachable Wireless-N Cable Access" Corinex CXWC-HD200-WNeH
to play with. This has been used for Internet access over TV coax cable in a
bungalow park where it has been replaced.
So it is some sort of cable modem. According to the source it's not managed
network over cable (docsis) but more like ethernet over cable, a relative
of ethernet over powerline. Searching a bit finds hempro | JPK consulting
which seems to be the next generation and isn't compatible.
I also found
Docsis, EOC of Moca toegepast in kleine kabeltelevisienetwerken which mentions that Corinex products are ethernet over cable according
to the HomePNA (abbreviated HPNA) 3.1 standard.
The only mention of these devices are for Dutch bungalow parks or campsites,
for example woon op een camping, open wifi. geen internet.
The site at corinex.nl just lists why you
should stop relying on these devices and replace them with newer technologies
that are supported.
It's not clear to me whether I can simply set up a network with a bit of
coax and another HomePNA coax interface or whether I need some sort of headend.
Time to play with the device and see how far I can get!
First poweron
Blinking leds, no smoke. On 2.4 GHz a wireless network named WiFi
appears and starts interfering with other wifi networks in the neighbourhood.
Nothing on 5 GHz. The 'power' and 'WLAN' leds are green, no others are active.
Trying to connect
The network WiFi has no wireless security. But trying to connect
to it with my laptop gives nothing my network-manager likes.
The device also has an ethernet port. This port gives no stable link, it
keeps going up and down:
20:03:49 eth0: no link
20:03:51 eth0: no link
20:03:53 eth0: negotiated 100baseTx-FD flow-control, link ok
20:03:54 eth0: no link
20:03:55 eth0: negotiated 100baseTx-FD flow-control, link ok
20:03:56 eth0: no link
20:03:59 eth0: negotiated 100baseTx-FD flow-control, link ok
20:04:00 eth0: no link
20:04:03 eth0: negotiated 100baseTx-FD flow-control, link ok
20:04:04 eth0: no link
20:04:07 eth0: negotiated 100baseTx-FD flow-control, link ok
20:04:08 eth0: no link
The next step is to get out the universal reset tool and use the 'wifi reset'
button on a powerup. This doesn't change a thing.
It's not a DHCP server, turn things around
Peering deeply at tcpdump suddenly makes it very clear this device is a
DHCP client and not a DHCP server:
It turns out 00:0B:C2 is indeed Corinex Communication Corp.
This explains the problem network-manager has: in the default configuration
network-manager checks a new connection for a DHCP server and gives up when
that fails.
So the solution to connect to it over Wifi is to use a connection profile
where I set a fixed IPv4 address and run a DHCP server myself.
Using a setup where the laptop is DHCP server over wifi made the device get an
address I wanted, and in capturing traffic I noticed it defaults to
10.10.1.253.
The only thing I notice is that after a reboot it switches to using the other
ethernet address 00:0b:c2:11:90:23. Both are on the bottom of the device.
But still no access to the webinterface
Giving it IPv4 addresses with a DHCP server makes it accept those, one for
each of the given ethernet mac addresses. The device has an http interface
which just returns 401 unauthorized and doesn't accept any of the
username/password combinations I try. It has a DNS resolver on port 53 but
forwards the DNS requests to 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 (google DNS) immediately.
If I leave it running for a while it will do an NTP request:
193.67.79.202 is ntp0.nl.uu.net. This reminds me of the problems in the past
with devices all using the same NTP server without asking the owner of the
server whether this was a good idea!
Current conclusion
This device is not letting me in at the moment and I don't know whether I can
make it establish a link over coax. To Be Continued!
