My transition from BT to bethere is now complete and I’m happy  with the results. The upload throughput is roughly three times faster than before which is great news for CallLog and this blog. Hopefully, anyone reading has noticed a quicker delivery of this page.

I have to say, the customer service aspect of bethere has been the best I’ve seen yet. To let you know how the migration is going they keep you well informed via SMS. I received messages letting me know the new hardware was en-route, that it had been delivered and a final message telling me the cable had been plugged in.

Anyway, I digress. Having installed the new router and followed the relevant installation instructions, I had a few other issues:

1. Internal attempts to access CallLog or my blog landed me at my router configuration page.
2. Signing into secure areas of CallLog resulted in an invalid security certificate being sent to the browser.

It wasn’t hard to work out what was going on with both of these issues. The solution however wasn’t as friendly as I’d hoped. Hence the choice of image above.

So, the first problem is that NAT loopback isn’t enabled by default on the THOMSON TG585v7 router they send you. Unfortunately, you can’t enable this using their friendly web configuration interface and so you need to drop into command line and change this setting via a telnet session with the router:

1. telnet to your gateway address (e.g. telnet 192.168.1.254)
2. log into the router with your admin credentials.
3. issue the command to enable NAT loopback and remember this setting:
   
   ip config natloopback=enabled
   saveall

After making this change, you should start seeing your local network services through their externally facing URLs.

Moving on to the second problem - the router also offers a secure interface that comes with its very own self-signed security certificate. The problem here is that the wrong security certificate is being issued for SSL requests not intended for the router but intended for some secure server behind the router. The solution is to turn off this interface on the router:

1. telnet to your gateway address (e.g. telnet 192.168.1.254)
2. log into the router with your admin credentials.
3. issue the command to turn off SSL and remember this setting:
   
   service system ifdelete name=HTTPs group=wan
   saveall

Once you’ve made this change, you should start seeing your own security certificate coming through for secure requests.

This has been another episode of I got a shiny new router and all I have to show for it is this lousy telnet session.