61–70 of 212 posts
Burning question: what ISP is it connected via?
Burning question: what ISP is it connected via?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I really wonder why modem manufacturers feel the need to encapsulate everything so much. The alternative would be using an RTOS of some sort, implementing a full network stack (with > 100Mb throughput) and a USB device, as the bare minimum. Then you also have I2S audio, GNSS, etc. It probably makes more sense using an entire OS at some point. BTW, this is typical Qualcomm, that makes the chipsets for these modems.
Why not offload all that to the driver running on the main application processor? The risk of having a second, black-box running Linux is that it’ll get outdated and/or compromised and used as a persistence mechanism for malware.
Any chances that opening a root shell into the modem can be used to grab the closed firmware, reverse engineer it, then swap with an open source one? I mean it's not just about security but also being able to implement nice things to have running and connected while for example the phone operating system sleeps between calls.
Does the modem have access to GPS? If so, it would be interesting to implement theft protection or things alike. Do binaries built with "GOARCH=ARM ARM=7 GOOS=linux go build" work?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I really wonder why modem manufacturers feel the need to encapsulate everything so much. The alternative would be using an RTOS of some sort, implementing a full network stack (with > 100Mb throughput) and a USB device, as the bare minimum. Then you also have I2S audio, GNSS, etc. It probably makes more sense using an entire OS at some point. BTW, this is typical Qualcomm, that makes the chipsets for these modems.
Why not offload all that to the driver running on the main application processor? The risk of having a second, black-box running Linux is that it’ll get outdated and/or compromised and used as a persistence mechanism for malware.
According to this[0] which is a neat read anyway, it "has 256 MiB DRAM, 256 MiB NAND, and a single Cortex-A7 CPU clocked up to 1.3GHz." You can run DNS, a VPN, or a small web server even on a VPS with 32MB of RAM so those are pretty cool specs. [0] https://xnux.eu/devices/feature/modem-pp.html
It also was our main e-mail server and web server, hosting both our own website and several customer websites. We had a second one of the same specs for a few other things and backups, but that was our main workhorse.
[EDIT: They were running Linux 1.0 and 1.2, first with NCSA httpd, then Apache; when we first got them they ran Slackware, installed from floppies; I think we ended up installing Redhat at some point before we retired them; the modems were hanging off Cyclades serial cards; and they were literally hanging - for our first 16 lines we had US Robotics Sportster modems hanging on the wall. (I'm writing this in the hope someone will tell me to get off their lawn and tell me how they did more with less, btw.) ]
I have never really tried but it surprises me providers let you accept connections on a gsm connection.
Now it just needs to charge / run from solar and it can be dropped anywhere with signal. I wonder what sort of wattage this thing draws.
I think the biggest challenge to getting somewhere small enough that it can be "dropped anywhere" is definitively the solar panels. If you add the qualifier "where you have permission" it gets a lot easier - I don't think you need a very large panel to be able to power something suitably basic like this.