So I bought a CopperEdge-150 DSLAM on eBay for a very good price.
It didn’t come with the password.
CopperMountain is widely regarded as tight-lipped unless you have a service contract costing five figures with them.
So I broke in.
The CE-150 has two serial ports: the CRAFT port, for management, and the Diagnostic port, which is the equivalent to the console on a PC.
It has a pretty spiffy BIOS, based on vxWorks, so there’s something to work with.
First, I plugged my serial cable plus null modem adaptor plus gender changer into the Diagnostic port.
Then, found the IP address: ifShow, and looked through the output and found 63.171.192.23, with a netmask of 0xffffffe0
On my workstation, I set up an FTP server, added a temporary IP address to my machine: ip addr add dev eth0 63.171.192.24/27, and got to work.
On the CE-150, hostAdd “betelgeuse”,“63.171.192.24” sets up a host entry, then netDevCreate “betelgeuse:”,“betelgeuse”,1 sets up an FTP session device.
Then, cd “/CE200/SYSTEM”, and iam “username”,“password” for logging into the FTP server.
Then, the magic copy “CONFIG.TGZ”.“betelgeuse:cf.tgz”.
Voila, I have the config file, a gzipped text file (not a TAR file!). In it is an encrypted (hashed, I suspect) copy of the admin password.
So in the morning, I’ll have to edit the config file, re-gzip, and copy it back. With luck, it’ll take a blank. We’ll see.
(The next morning) No, no go. I was trying too hard. Just rm “CONFIG.TGZ”.