Sky are obviously very keen to make sure all its customers are using the router which Sky supplied to them, but why is that? A common explanation is that it makes things easier for customer support. Another reason that some people have suggested is that it's part of Sky company "dogma" - just as you're forced to use Sky's TV receiver, so too are you forced to use Sky's broadband router. There's probably some truth in these points, but I think there's a much bigger reason for this policy, ...

As part of my efforts to crack the Sagem router, I managed to accidentally "brick" my Sagem router. Normally, if the router's flash memory has been corrupted, the router goes into a recovery mode which has a stripped-down web server through which you can load a new flash image. Unfortunately, I seemed to have got the router into a state where it was crashing at startup but wasn't going into its recovery mode.

Then I stumbled upon this link. OK, it's for the Linksys WRT54G ...

Now don't get too excited but I've been working on the Sagem router, trying to crack it, although I'm not there yet. Actually, I'll come clean and admit that in fact, I've managed to "brick" my router.

I bought the router off eBay. I've tested it and it manages to establish a connection to Sky's network, so the username and password are still valid (they haven't been deleted from Sky's authentication server).

The CD has a router recovery utility, but the flash ...