The first thing you need to know is the configuration panel IP address for your router. This information is written on its manual. It is usually 192.168.0.1, 192.168.1.1 or 10.0.0.1. So, launch your web browser and open http://[IP address here]. The router used on our examples uses the address 192.168.1.1, so we would need to open http://192.168.1.1. Of course you need to change that according to the IP address used by your router.

All configuration options vary according to the router model. So, maybe you won’t find the options we are describing here with the exact same name, but they will exist, since we are talking only about basic options.

Usually the very first configuration page asks you to choose between a quick setup and an advanced setup. Even though quick setup is the best for setting up your network in less than five minutes, the very first configuration you should do is inside advanced setup: setting up a password for your router.

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Figure 11: First screen on the router configuration panel.

As you can see, your router configuration panel is accessible from any computer on your network. Even though this may not be an issue on very small networks, the router control panel can usually be accessed from any computer located on the Internet. For example, let’s say that your real IP address is 69.69.69.69 (the IP address that your ISP assigned to your broadband modem). Any computer on the Internet can access your router configuration panel by simply opening a web browser and pointing it to http://69.69.69.69. This feature can be disabled on some routers. However, it is a very interesting feature, as you can repair or reconfigure your office or home network from any computer in the world. So it is up to you to enable or disable this feature, depending if you are going to use it or not.

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Figure 12: Setting up the admin password.

On our router, this configuration is done at Advanced Setup, System, Administrator Settings. At this screen you can both setup the admin password and choose to enable remote management. On our router remote management is disabled, we could enable it and choose to enable it just for one specific IP address (for instance, the IP address from our home computer), so other computers won’t be able to access the router control panel remotely. Also, you can specify an access port. Using the router on Figure 12, we couldn’t access it by using http://69.69.69.69, we would need to open it as http://69.69.69.69:8080. This is a simple way of preventing wannabe hackers to open your router configuration panel from their computer (serious hackers know that 8080 is a common used port and can also run a port scan to see which ports are open on your router).

Of course you must click on Apply to make the changes effective.

So, after this very important security explanation, let’s go to the basic router configuration.