A Blog from Geoff Masters

I recently acquired a Nortel Contivity 1740 VPN Router for free from a business associate.

Great! I thought, however it was passworded and yes, you’ve guessed it, nobody knew the password.  I immediately got to work to try and find a solution to bypass the password. I loaded up Google in my web browser, and with great hope began to type the phrase ‘Nortel Contivity Password Recovery’, one and a half hours passed and still I hadn’t found a solution that worked. I decided that more drastic measures were required.

Eventually I gave up with google and decided to remove the lid from my new toy. As I inspected the motherboard I noticed an Intel PLCC programmable device, voila I thought, maybe the password is stored on this device!  As I work in an electronic repair lab I decided to remove the device to investigate further. I placed the device in our  lab programmer and successfully read the contents, on closer inspection of the data on my monitor I had not only found the password, but I had also found the username and the IP address of the management interface!

I soldered the PLCC device back onto the motherboard booted up the unit and when I was presented with the logon screen I typed in the username and password I had read in our lab programmer and to my satisfaction it worked! Once logged in I factory defaulted the unit and removed the password, so to sum up the username and password are stored in a programmable PLCC device on the router motherboard.

I never did find any other way of recovering from a lost or forgotten password on this router, if anyone knows of an easier way of doing this, don’t be shy and share the knowledge!

For those of you that do not know the default username and password for these is:

Username: admin

Password: setup

Greetings!

I have recently noticed that there seems to be a lot of people looking for the Nortel Contivity VPN Router Recovery Diskette. This disk should work in Nortel 1500, 1700, 2500, 2700, 2600, 4000 and 5000 VPN Routers. This disk can be made using a working Contivity VPN Router, the problem being, that by the time that most people realise they need one of these disks their unit is non-functional and they are not able to make one!

Download the recovery disk image below, hopefully Nortel wont have a problem with me offering this for download here.

Nortel Contivity VPN Router Recovery Disk

Once the image has been extracted from the zip file above it can be written to a 1.4MB floppy disk using ‘rawrite‘ or ‘dd‘.

After the router has been booted with the above bootdisk you will be prompted for the original username and password that was set when the box was originally configured. So as you can see this bootdisk cannot be used for password recovery. This disk is however extremely useful if the hard drive on your router has become corrupt and you need to restore it from a previously backed up image.

Hopefully someone will find this information useful.