Sky Broadband niggles...

Right, so after my various telecoms-related nightmares, I'm awaiting activation of Sky broadband on my line... to ease the wait, they've sent me a shiny new "Sky Broadband" router. Which is incidentally identical (apart from the Sky branding) to my trusty Netgear DG834GT-UK.

Or so I thought until I plugged it in and turned it on. It turns out that it's all very neatly pre-configured for my broadband service (I guess this explains why I went mad looking for a broadband username and password), and wireless (WPA-PSK out of the box!) etc.

Great... except for one little thing. Or two. 1. They negelected to give me the username and password for my router. OK, I know they sent it to me and so it may be theirs and not mine, but it's in my house and I therefor have a right to configure it ;-). So a couple of guesses, and yup it's admin and sky. How clever - they can't blame anyone for accessing the router interface if they make things downright bleedin' obvious.
2. They've customised the firmware on the box so I can't actually access the screens relating to the authentication and ADSL settings. I suppose this is for my own protection... after all anyone ordering Sky broadband must be incapable of doing anything but harm here, right? Or is it to prevent their own tech support from getting ambitious and actually trying to troubleshoot?

Well, whatever the reasons, for reasons of territorial sovereignty as stated above, I decided I must know what my broadband username and password were. Time to tether the phone and get Googling.

I found a promising looking forum at www.skyuser.co.uk and an interesting thread here. Beware, this thread is 9 pages of firmware flashing, flashing LEDs, disclaimers, MAC codes, hex passwords and general discombobulated obfuscation. OK actually they're all trying to figure it out and help, so maybe not that last bit. After spending half an hour there, I went back to Google and found a MUCH easier way... here. Easy peasy. :-)