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This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem
111–120 of 212 posts
Re: This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem
#112I have been using these modems at work, specifically the EC25/EC20. They come with linux with some limitations. These modems are typically meant for IOT devices and you can get them for ~ 16/18 USD (or even lower). 4G/3G/2G, with around 128/256M flash and 128M RAM and 1.3GHz Arm Cortex A7. They are pretty powerful for their size, cost, current consumption and usability. Almost all such parts can be hacked across manu…
I'm a bit confused: does the manufacturer provide a toolchain to compile and run binary code on something that is not advertised as a SOM/SOC, but only as an lte modem?
Re: This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
I started with a Pentium I, 166Mhz, 16MB, 1GB HDD, and I'm not even that old. I imagine we have folks here that started on a PDP :-) My P1 would stutter while playing MP3s :-))
I was able to play mp3s on my 486 DX4-100Mhz if I remember correctly.
Yes. My 486 DX2-66MHz could do 112kbit MP3s, but was struggling with 128kbit MP3s.
Re: This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem
#114So a modem on a pine phone can survive the HN hug of death (and the number one post no less)? Am I missing something here? Because there's no way I believe that!
A static site is really easy to host and HN's hug of death isn't actually that intense; the site itself only gets like six million views a day, a fraction of those click on every link, and no syndicated page has much reach.
I recently migrated a personal blog running on a hugo static site to digital ocean with automated github deployment, SSL certificates, CDN, and a custom domain. It took all of 15 minutes including updating the DNS on my custom domain registrar.
Re: This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem
#115Re: This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem
#116So a modem on a pine phone can survive the HN hug of death (and the number one post no less)? Am I missing something here? Because there's no way I believe that!
Something in front of it, maybe? It reports nginx. $ curl --head 'https://nns.ee/blog/2021/04/01/modem-blog.html' HTTP/2 200 server: nginx date: Fri, 02 Apr 2021 13:28:26 GMT content-type: text/html content-length: 12937 last-modified: Fri, 02 Apr 2021 09:40:40 GMT etag: "6066e698-3289" accept-ranges: bytes
The op mentions in another comment that he has nginx in front: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26670500
No idea if he's caching there, though.
Re: This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
For a while I've really liked the thought of small little cheap hardened devices that could be surreptitiously dropped to act like wifi extenders as a "guerilla mesh". Of course there'd probably need to be some thought put into making them safe and look harmless enough not to trigger any kind of severe response if found. But imagine taking a bag around town and dropping "disposable" devices with low enough power use…
Displacing the heat in continuous usage will also probably be a challenge, not to mention figuring out how to deploy updates, having nodes be compromised, impostor nodes, latency, etc. I mean it's an idea I've thrown around a lot in my head since college, but in all my scenarios, I never opened it up to the public, it was just going to be used for me. If that's the case, then yeah it's doable.
Depends on climate, I guess. I'm in London and here the far greater problem would be moisture and not heat dissipation.
Deploying updates is not that hard - you'll want a flash that's large enough for at least two partitions so you can keep a known good version around. Other than that, signing updates isn't a big deal, and tamper-proofing key storage enough for casual use isn't that hard. I wouldn't trust sending senstitive data clear-text over a network like that, but I wouldn't do that over public wifi anyway.
Latency is a bit more of a challenge if you're somewhere that'd need lots of hops, but if you are then presumably the alternative is worse, especially if you have nodes with LTE connectivity as a possible fallback.
Re: This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Something in front of it, maybe? It reports nginx. $ curl --head 'https://nns.ee/blog/2021/04/01/modem-blog.html' HTTP/2 200 server: nginx date: Fri, 02 Apr 2021 13:28:26 GMT content-type: text/html content-length: 12937 last-modified: Fri, 02 Apr 2021 09:40:40 GMT etag: "6066e698-3289" accept-ranges: bytes
Could be. The statuspage from the device shows darkhttpd as the server, not nginx: https://nns.ee/blog/status.html
I see nginx there too.
% curl -I https://nns.ee/blog/status.html HTTP/2 200 server: nginx date: Fri, 02 Apr 2021 14:48:48 GMT content-type: text/html content-length: 8754 last-modified: Fri, 02 Apr 2021 14:48:31 GMT etag: "60672ebf-2232" accept-ranges: bytes
Re: This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem
#119Wait wait wait, does this mean data is going over a cellular network? On a data plan from some phone company? And their blog post just showed up here, on the front page of HN, which is notorious for crushing small servers with traffic?
LOLSOB, I really hope this poor person isn't in the US. Or the cellphone overage charges...
Re: This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem
#120doesn't sound very secure seeing all those processes running under root...
Original firmware is full of security issues. Things like effectively running `system("something %s", some string input from AT command)` under root, etc.
Originally I wanted to get access to the FW via one of these issues, but then I found the adb unlock, and it's way easier.
All it took me to crack their ADB protection was to extract and disassemble their atfwd_daemon from firmware update package, and look for interestingly named commands and reverse their algorithm for generating the unlock key.
You can see for yourself how "complicated" it is:
https://xnux.eu/devices/feature/qadbkey-unlock.c
And that was it.
They also allow to run code under root downloaded from the net via special push SMS, etc. Thankfully not enabled by default. But bleh.