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The Graveyard - Products No Longer Supported => Routers / COVR => DIR-330 => Topic started by: sickfish on February 10, 2009, 02:46:33 PM

Title: Invalid characters in pre-shared key?
Post by: sickfish on February 10, 2009, 02:46:33 PM

I'm attempting to set up my DIR-330 with a VPN to a Cisco PIX 506E.  I believe I have all my settings correct; however, when I click "Save Settings" I get the following error message:

Pre-shared Key is invalid. The legal characters can not enter # * , ; ' / " :

This message appears to be generated by client-side Javascript and is preventing the form from being posted.  The pre-shared key given by my network administrator does indeed contain a forward slash and a semicolon.  This is not a problem for my old Linksys VPN router.  Is there any way to "escape" these characters, or bypass the validation altogether, to allow my DIR-330 to save the VPN settings?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

(Side note: I originally attempted to attach a screenshot to this post, but got an error about the attachments folder being unwritable...)

Title: Re: Invalid characters in pre-shared key?
Post by: sickfish on February 12, 2009, 08:54:59 AM

Upon further investigation, it seems that the page submits all of the VPN configuration information in one form value called "vpn_conn1".  This value contains each VPN setting in key-value pairs separated by semicolons, which explains why the UI would have validation to prevent semicolons from being entered.  However, to the best of my knowledge, a semicolon is a perfectly valid character in a shared key.  I would hope that there is a way to escape this value, or "quote" the entire PSK entry.  I even tried re-sending the actual POST request outside of the built-in UI to bypass the validation.  This resulted my VPN being listed in the VPN list, but with a truncated key - the semicolon and everything after it weren't there, as if they were part of an unrecognized (and subsequently ignored) parameter.  I then tried replacing the semicolon with %3B, with the same result.  Wrapping the key value in single and double quotes didn't help either.

There really should be no reason why a DIR-330 should be unable to connect to VPNs that use these characters.  Other than this "issue", I really like this router.  I want to make it work!

Title: Re: Invalid characters in pre-shared key?
Post by: sickfish on February 25, 2009, 07:41:39 AM

No one has any ideas? :(

Title: Re: Invalid characters in pre-shared key?
Post by: Fatman on March 20, 2009, 09:22:30 AM

I don't know why I have been missing posts in this board, I did not see this thread or a couple others until just now.

I will pass this on to PM, this is going to require some decent amount of tinkering.

Title: Re: Invalid characters in pre-shared key?
Post by: sickfish on March 20, 2009, 10:12:15 AM

Excellent. In the meantime I've taken to swapping routers for different VPNs :(  If I can get my DIR-330 to work with this PSK, I can finally scrap my old router :D

Title: Re: Invalid characters in pre-shared key?
Post by: sickfish on May 14, 2009, 08:14:36 AM

It's been a while.  Has anyone had a similar issue, or (even better!) found a solution?