topic Re: How to disable remote access to the Plusnet Hub 2 management interface in My Router

How to disable remote access to the Plusnet Hub 2 management interface

JohnAndyB — Mon, 26 Sep 2022 13:25:15 GMT

I just got a static IP address for my Plusnet service.

While checking that incoming traffic was able to get to the address, I was surprised to find that by default I was able to access my router's management web interface remotely. I would have expected this to be disabled, for security reasons.

I'd like to disable remote access to the router's management interface, so that it is only accessible from my local LAN.

I can't see an option to do this? Am I missing something, or is it a matter of setting up a firewall rule to block the access?

Re: How to disable remote access to the Plusnet Hub 2 management interface

pjmarsh — Mon, 26 Sep 2022 13:31:48 GMT

As far as I can remember it is disabled. When you were testing, where you on your LAN and just using your external IP address?

Re: How to disable remote access to the Plusnet Hub 2 management interface

Baldrick1 — Mon, 26 Sep 2022 13:32:55 GMT

@JohnAndyB Welcome to the community forum.

How have you come to the conclusion that you can access it remotely? I suspect that you have somehow got your wires crossed.

Re: How to disable remote access to the Plusnet Hub 2 management interface

JohnAndyB — Mon, 26 Sep 2022 13:45:45 GMT

Hmmm, maybe remote access is not happening after all.

I was testing just by using the external IP address in my browser instead of my local 192.168... address.

The management interface was coming up using the external IP address so I thought external access was possible.

But maybe not...

I don't have an alternative internet connection here (no mobile signal), so I switched on a VPN and then tried to access the router remotely, as if from Germany.

This time the management interface did not respond.

So I guess the router must be clever enough to spot (when I'm not using the VPN) that I'm trying to connect to it's own external-facing address and to handle the traffic internally without routing to the internet and back.

This seems to be confirmed using tracert and also by the results of online IP scan tools that are reporting my port 80 to be filtered.

So it seems there's no need for me to find a way to disable remote access - it has been disabled all along.

Apologies if I've wasted anyone's time - but I'll leave this thread on the record just in case anyone else finds this information useful.

Re: How to disable remote access to the Plusnet Hub 2 management interface

JohnAndyB — Mon, 26 Sep 2022 13:50:30 GMT

>As far as I can remember it is disabled. When you were testing, where you on your LAN and just using your external IP >address?

Yes, exactly this.

I think you're right, and the interface is disabled, and I was just using a wrong way of testing it.

Thanks, John

Re: How to disable remote access to the Plusnet Hub 2 management interface

pjmarsh — Mon, 26 Sep 2022 13:52:05 GMT

Most routers will deal with the external address internally when it's used from within the LAN, which is what you are seeing. With a VPN you are creating a tunnel from the client to the server, and the traffic is directed through that tunnel, so the router doesn't see the use of your external address. When doing that the request to your router would be coming from the servers at the other end of the VPN connection, and so would be hitting your router externally.