So long story short, I got my broadband upgraded and as part of this received a Technicolor TG582 Pro as part of the bundle. I had no intention of using this on the basis my existing router was up to the ADSL 2+ (yes – I live outside of a cable area).
So all went well with the upgrade however the 5* rated router that I had started to not respond – looked like some sort of CPU spike. Having read the reviews of the Technicolor, I was not expecting much from it, but at least if I used the device I could have a sensible conversation with Demon technical support.
Initial impressions of the router were not good, the wizard interface seemed to want to prompt for a password every screen on Firefox/Chrome but struggled through the basic set up to get a link running at the same speed as the 5* router and with better Wifi coverage too.
The Web based UI is very limited but I managed to set most of the initial basics up but I could not seem to get to a screen that would allow me to use OpenDNS.
I really love OpenDNS, in the world of just doing something basic well this ticks all of the boxes. The basic being that if I am browsing normally I will have a suitably filtered experience that can be easily controlled for all of the family.
So research lead me to the command line interface for this router as this seems to be the only way of doing anything advanced. To access this requires the 80’s throwback a telnet client. If you are using any modern version of Windows then you will need to install the likes of putty to get a telnet client. Other operating systems mileage will vary, seems to be there by default on Ubuntu, on Android Connectbot works well.
So once you have your telnet client of choice, connect to the router by typing the IP address of the router (192.168.254.254 by default – but it will be whatever you typed in to get to it in your choice of web browser initially).
Please note, the commands here are not particularly forgiving and I suggest that if you are not prepared to do a factory reset if this does not work that you stop here.
You should then get a username and password prompt at which you can enter the same username and password that you set in the web interface. You should now have a prompt that ends in ==>. Note you can type help pretty much any time.
Type the following to get the name of the ADSL interface (yes the leading colon is required for safety – you can probably type the command without it and get the same effect):
:ppp iflist
You should see a series of lines; the first couple of which look like:
Internet: dest atm_Internet [05:09:48] retry : 10 admin state = up oper state = up link state = connected
The name is highlighted above and is Internet on the Demon router set up – this does not seem to be the default for other providers so use their name for this interface. Type the following commands:
:dns server route flush :dns server route add dns=208.67.222.222 metric=10 intf=Internet :dns server route add dns=208.67.220.220 metric=10 intf=Internet :saveall
That’s it – browse to somewhere that does not exist or a known banned site for you and you should see OpenDNS block pages. Note – I have a fixed IP address so do not need to worry about IP address tracking features in OpenDNS.
To get out of the telnet session on the router type:
:exit
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