Hacking the Toshiba PCX2200

In this tutorial I’m going to explain how to connect to your Toshiba PCX2200 cable modem to view it’s status page (with screenshots!).

There are 2 methods for doing so. Both assume you are smart, and protect your computers by having a NAT router between your cable modem and the computers. This is not necessary, and you can still follow the tutorial if you don’t. Just replace all the references to “router” with “primary network card on your computer.” This may work with other Toshiba models also, but I have been unable to test any so far.
The less painful method (less painful because you only lose internet connectivity once)

• This way is much more useful, but requires some additional equipment. Specifically a hub/switch and a 2nd network card in you computer.

So to start you will want to connect your hub/switch to your modem via a Cat5 cable.
Off the hub/switch, you plug one RJ-45 Cable into your router’s WAN interface, to maintain internet connectivity.
Plug another cable from the hub/switch to your 2nd network card that is in your computer.
Unfortunately, you’ll now have to restart your cable modem most likely. The reason for this is that most cable modems only allow one MAC address to be connected to them at once. They keep a record of which MAC was the last one connected to it. So when you change the device/computer that is connected to the modem (in this case, you’ll be changing from your router to your hub/switch), you have to restart the modem in order to update the cache of the MAC address to the hub/switch’s. Configure your 2nd network card with an IP address of 192.168.100.2 and with a gateway of 192.168.100.1
Now whenever you want to view the web interface of your Toshiba modem, just point your browser to http://192.168.100.1/

The slightly more painful method (you lose internet each time you want to check your modem’s status)

All you have to do for this method is connect the modem directly to the NIC in your PC, restart the modem (power it off for at least 10 secs), and put 192.168.100.2 as your network card’s IP w/ 192.168.100.1 as the gateway and point your browser at http://192.168.100.1/. When you are done, plug the modem back into your router, and restart it. Set your IP and gateway back to whatever it was previously. The problem with this is that

1. You lose internet connectivity to your entire house each time you want to look at the status page
2. You have to reconfigure your network card each time
3. You have to restart the modem each time, so that the uptime and possibly other stats will not be correct – which defeats some of the purpose.

In general the web interface of the Toshiba modems is pretty dull. It doesn’t provide you with a ton of information. But regardless it does give you some incite into what is going on inside your modem.

Screenshots

(Click to enlarge)