Monday, October 10, 2011

FIOS Router CLI and DHCP


I recently got Verizon FIOS service.  The router Verizon provides is an Actiontec MI424WR.  Verizon goes to some trouble to hide the Actiontec branding; but, for example, the Model Name field in the System Monitoring tab on mine says "MI424WR-GEN2".

Anyway, I wanted to get the DHCP lease database out of the router in order to populate that information into my own DNS server.  I initially looked at scraping the web interface, but the router does some weird Javascript hashing of the password before submitting it to the server.  I figured there had to be a better way.

In the advanced options you can turn on telnet access to the router.  That gets you into a command line administration utility, which in turn will let you access a shell (via "system shell").  However I was unable to find a DHCP lease database in the filesystem.  There was a /var/state/dhcp directory, but it was empty.

Some searching on the web turned up the fact that the Actiontec MI424WR runs a commercial Linux distro called OpenRG.  More searching turned up an OpenRG Configuration Entries Guide.  A bit more poking and I found that this command will dump out the DHCP lease database:

conf print dev/br0/dhcps/lease

3 comments:

larsks said...

Any chance of updating this with a link to the OpenRG configuration entries guide?

larsks said...

For people who end up here via Google...here's a config guide: http://www.scribd.com/doc/88752930/Openrg-Configuration-Guide

Jason Heiss said...

Thanks for adding a URL. At the time I wrote this the only copy of that guide I could find online looked to be at a URL that wasn't likely to stay around long so I did not link to it.