Ian Wallace wants to be a Ninja. Or, more precisely, he wants to help Île Sans Fil by applying his technical skills. But he needs to learn all about the router and its firmware, so that he can feel confident when he works for us. He tried to hook up with Francis Daigneault (good choice!) for some training, but that didn’t happen. So he decided to approach me (bad choice!) for a familiarization session.

We agreed to meet at Zeeba Café, Livres et Internet, our only hotspot that’s not on the Island of Montréal. A very pleasant place, where Bruce Hollingdrake fills the air with streamed music from his own collection as well as Virgin Radio, and the fumes of Kicking Horse Coffee. (Bruce’s wife is Persian, and “Zeeba” means “beautiful” in Farsi. It’s also the name of their beautiful cat).

I showed up early, and Ian showed up late. He had been helping out at the Saint-Sulpice expansion, which took longer than anyone had planned.

So we sat down with our coffee, while Bruce cocked a watchful eye on us.

We could get the login screen and the portal with no problem. We could see the default gateway from ipconfig, no problem. But when we tried to login to the admin page with HTTP, we were sucking air. Hmmm.

We tried with SSH (PuTTY). Aha! We got the login prompt. But when we tried to log in as root, with the “normal” password, we got “Access denied”.

Well, I was not surprised. You see, This hotspot is a special case. Bruce’s wife works with Mina Naguib, and Mina has helped Bruce set up this hotspot. So, it wouldn’t surprise me if Mina has configured this router to deny HTTP access, and that he has changed the root password.

But Ian was very frustrated. He has never been able to login to the router at any ÎSF hotspot. He had hoped that by hooking up with me he could at least familiarize himself with the admin interface. But because I had invited him to this particular hotspot, he struck out again.

I hope Ian doesn’t get too discouraged. I suggested he go to the Atwater library, where we have two routers with “normal” login security.

As for Zeeba, I hope Mina will continue to keep the router up to date, including the renewal of the OpenVPN certificate.

At the nadir of our frustration, my wife Jeanne arrived to pick me up. She had just bought some delicious nut-bread from the Pâtisserie Artisanale next store. That raised my spirits again.