Riccardo Serafini tapionx

Trashing the Vodafone Station

How to replace the Vodafone Station with your very own router

Vodafone forces its customers to use their modem/router, the "Vodafone Station": using any other router is impossible because authentication is being done via a custom PPPoE setup.
In the PPPoE packet there is a field named Host-Uniq which is used to separate packets from different PPPoE sessions: Vodafone requires the Station serial number to be put in this field as authentication.

Hardware setup

A Linux router with root access is needed to replace the Station with. With an xDSL connection a modem with a custom firmware like OpenWrt has to be used, most likely one based on a Lantiq SoC.
For a FTTH internet connection then every machine with at least two gigabit ethernet interface and a decent CPU will do it.

Don't use VPN services.

No, seriously, don't. You're probably reading this because you've asked what VPN service to use, and this is the answer.

Note: The content in this post does not apply to using VPN for their intended purpose; that is, as a virtual private (internal) network. It only applies to using it as a glorified proxy, which is what every third-party "VPN provider" does.

A Russian translation of this article can be found here, contributed by Timur Demin.
A Turkish translation can be found here, contributed by agyild.
There's also this article about VPN services, which is honestly better written (and has more cat pictures!) than my article.

	#!/bin/bash

	# compiled from https://docs.docker.com/engine/installation/linux/debian/#/debian-jessie-80-64-bit

	sudo apt-get update
	sudo apt-get dist-upgrade -y
	sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https ca-certificates -y

	sudo sh -c "echo deb https://apt.dockerproject.org/repo debian-jessie main > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list"
	sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://p80.pool.sks-keyservers.net:80 --recv-keys 58118E89F3A912897C070ADBF76221572C52609D

	history.replaceState && history.replaceState(
	null, '', location.pathname + location.search.replace(/[\?&]message=[^&]+/, '').replace(/^&/, '?')
	);