FastEddieB
Touchdown! Greaser!
- Joined
- Oct 14, 2013
- Messages
- 11,537
- Location
- Lenoir City, TN/Mineral Bluff, GA
- Display Name
Display name:
Fast Eddie B
Part 1
As backstory, last week my Linksys RE6400 repeater had gone offline. It’s happened a couple of times in the past for no apparent reason, but was fairly easy to get set up again. Last Wed afternoon I got around to dealing with it.
I Googled “Linksys RE6400 Setup” and clicked on one of the links provided. It took me to this screen:
I clicked on “SET UP AS AN EXTENDER” and I got a page saying it couldn’t be found. I tried unplugging it and plugging it back in to no avail. I pushed the “RESET” button with a paperclip and still nothing.
The page I had been sent to had a chat option. I tried that but it seemed to hang up after one back-and-forth. So I called…
I got a gentleman with an Indian or Pakistani accent. He asked me what I had tried, and what the unit’s light was doing. I told him and he asked how many devices were on our home network, whether I sometimes used public wifi, if guests to our home were ever given our network password, that sort of thing. He suggested he could troubleshoot if I could give him screen access. I said sure, he sent me an app and a session number and got control of my screen. He asked me to unplug my second monitor and closed all the open Safari windows (I was on my Mac) and opened Terminal. He scrolled down lines of code and showed me code that suggested almost 60 users had access to my network, and that was likely overloading the repeater, and that he could fix it. Again, I said OK, and he said he was going to send it over to a network engineer to work on a solution. He then said “Why don’t you have a cup of coffee and relax while we work on this”.
Maybe something in the way he said that almost immediately set off my Spidey Sense, and I just got a sick feeling something wasn’t right. I hung up and shut down my computer and took a few moments to calm down and analyze what might have happened. I wasn’t 100% sure the exchange wasn’t kosher, but I had my doubts.
Part 2 to follow…
As backstory, last week my Linksys RE6400 repeater had gone offline. It’s happened a couple of times in the past for no apparent reason, but was fairly easy to get set up again. Last Wed afternoon I got around to dealing with it.
I Googled “Linksys RE6400 Setup” and clicked on one of the links provided. It took me to this screen:
I clicked on “SET UP AS AN EXTENDER” and I got a page saying it couldn’t be found. I tried unplugging it and plugging it back in to no avail. I pushed the “RESET” button with a paperclip and still nothing.
The page I had been sent to had a chat option. I tried that but it seemed to hang up after one back-and-forth. So I called…
I got a gentleman with an Indian or Pakistani accent. He asked me what I had tried, and what the unit’s light was doing. I told him and he asked how many devices were on our home network, whether I sometimes used public wifi, if guests to our home were ever given our network password, that sort of thing. He suggested he could troubleshoot if I could give him screen access. I said sure, he sent me an app and a session number and got control of my screen. He asked me to unplug my second monitor and closed all the open Safari windows (I was on my Mac) and opened Terminal. He scrolled down lines of code and showed me code that suggested almost 60 users had access to my network, and that was likely overloading the repeater, and that he could fix it. Again, I said OK, and he said he was going to send it over to a network engineer to work on a solution. He then said “Why don’t you have a cup of coffee and relax while we work on this”.
Maybe something in the way he said that almost immediately set off my Spidey Sense, and I just got a sick feeling something wasn’t right. I hung up and shut down my computer and took a few moments to calm down and analyze what might have happened. I wasn’t 100% sure the exchange wasn’t kosher, but I had my doubts.
Part 2 to follow…
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