Working with the Hawking Technology Hi-Gain Wireless-300N Range Extender (HWREN1)

Published 2010-09-09

I got this wireless extender for a friend, to help him bend the wireless throughout his house. His wireless modem is in his office, which is in a back corner, and there are lots of spots where the signal is weak.

Finding the IP address of the unit

I plugged the cat5 from the network port on the box into my laptop, ran tcpdump, and the box started spewing multicast Simple Service Discovery: 

$ sudo tcpdump -i eth0
tcpdump: verbose output suppressed, use -v or -vv for full protocol decode
listening on eth0, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet), capture size 65535 bytes
21:32:43.794354 IP 192.168.1.240.filenet-rpc > 239.255.255.250.ssdp: UDP, length 327
21:32:43.902515 IP 192.168.1.240.filenet-rpc > 239.255.255.250.ssdp: UDP, length 327
...

The unit is then accessible at http://192.168.1.240 with username 'admin' and password '1234'. That should probably be changed…