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Building a freedom-friendly WiFi pocket-router (2020)

kulesz.me

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Re: Building a freedom-friendly WiFi pocket-router (2020)

#51
post #31

I'm surprised to find there's not more demand for "back to back" travel wifi routers, e.g. so you can connect once to a hotel wifi and immediately all devices are connected via the router's own wifi. This is useful not just for working around device limits but also for simplicity of setup when you have kids.

GL.iNET routers can do this, at least the Beryl AX I own does it perfectly.

Re: Building a freedom-friendly WiFi pocket-router (2020)

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Few have tried over the years, including juggernauts like Huawei, Samsung, LG. All failed. Add on top Apple. The only ones who did succeed are Mediatek with their bottom-of-the-barrel stuff... wonder how that is possible.

> The only ones who did succeed are Mediatek with their bottom-of-the-barrel stuff... wonder how that is possible. I'm not aware of Mediatek competing with LTE modems for routers, not even low-tier. I'm aware they are trying again now with 5G, but also here I'm not seeing big tractions for commercial products... Could you name an example device or chipset of a Mediatek-based LTE-router?

There's the RUT951-LTE [0] with an unspecified Mediatek SoC, and for tablets there's stuff like the mt8735d [1] (e.g. Lenovo Tab [2]).

[0] https://teltonika-networks.com/de/products/routers/rut951/

[1] https://www.mediatek.com/products/tablets/mt8735d

[2] https://benchmarks.ul.com/hardware/tablet/Lenovo+Tab+7+Essen...

Re: Building a freedom-friendly WiFi pocket-router (2020)

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't an issue with needing a fork that uses less memory. You're loading hundreds of thousands, if not millions of urls into memory so they can be compared to every single dns request happening. Text, even compressed, requires a certain amount of bytes to store, and there is no way to use less memory beyond that point, it's literally, physically impossible. Are there memory gains in adguard? Probably. But I doub…

Well, you could implement an LPM trie that focusses on FQDN labels; for example. Which would greatly reduce the memory usage compared to what AdGuard Home does currently with their per-rulelist-slices. If you represent LPM tries as JSON and order them by alphabet, you'll get even benefits of gzip on HDD to save lots of space. Just a suggestion and how I would implement it with an eBPF module, not meant as a critic.

Like I said, even with compression, gzip in your example, you can only load up so much data into the physical ram modules. Reduce the list to domains and cut out dupes, minimize the schema, kick least recently used entries, do whatever you can to drop memory usage, but it's a n+1 problem if memory usage is linked to an unknown sized set of block lists. A buffered pager that streams from disk to shifts through the list as it iterates and checks is going to need to take place if you can't hold it all in memory. Though, even with limited memory, if you're reading off fast storage, like nvme, the small amount of memeory shouldn't really matter much, as even reading the files from disk should be plenty fast enough for your average internet connection imo

Re: Building a freedom-friendly WiFi pocket-router (2020)

#54
post #31

I'm surprised to find there's not more demand for "back to back" travel wifi routers, e.g. so you can connect once to a hotel wifi and immediately all devices are connected via the router's own wifi. This is useful not just for working around device limits but also for simplicity of setup when you have kids.

Why carry yet another device/power source/etc?

If you have a non-artificially-limited android phone (i.e. rooted), you can just open a hotspot with everything going thru your wireguard vpn back to home.

If you have stock android or IOS, then the real owners of your device won't allow you do this, since they get location data from your network on all those devices.

Re: Building a freedom-friendly WiFi pocket-router (2020)

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only ones who did succeed are Mediatek with their bottom-of-the-barrel stuff... wonder how that is possible. I'm not aware of Mediatek competing with LTE modems for routers, not even low-tier. I'm aware they are trying again now with 5G, but also here I'm not seeing big tractions for commercial products... Could you name an example device or chipset of a Mediatek-based LTE-router?

There's the RUT951-LTE [0] with an unspecified Mediatek SoC, and for tablets there's stuff like the mt8735d [1] (e.g. Lenovo Tab [2]). [0] https://teltonika-networks.com/de/products/routers/rut951/ [1] https://www.mediatek.com/products/tablets/mt8735d [2] https://benchmarks.ul.com/hardware/tablet/Lenovo+Tab+7+Essen...

- According to the website, RUT951-LTE is based on a MIPS 24kc CPU from Mediatek, which is their major router platform, and does not include an LTE-Modem. It's likely MT7628K [1]

- The second example MT8735D is a tablet SoC (not just a modem but also a CPU, GPU, Audio DSP, Camera ISP etc in one package)

[1] https://www.mediatek.com/products/home-networking/mt7628k-n-...

Re: Building a freedom-friendly WiFi pocket-router (2020)

#56
I've been using the GL.INET GL-AR300M16 router for a couple of years. They work incredibly well. I can go to any hotel or cafe, plug it in the back of any free USB port (existing routers, TVs, or power banks if necessary) and away I go. If there's ethernet I plug it in, or if it's wifi then I can just auth through the router. That's all. Immediately I have all of my devices functioning as if I am still at home with appropriate DNS settings and similar.

But 300Mbps max throughput (2.4GHz, a/b/g/n) on a single antenna (meaning it's actually something like 150mbps down maximum) is frustrating. The 16mb storage also leaves barely any space on the router.

All I want is something that can boot on a minimum draw of 5A/1V -- and appropriately throttles performance down in that environment -- but can take something up to like 5A/3V and appropriately increases performance.

Re: Building a freedom-friendly WiFi pocket-router (2020)

#57
post #23

I was hoping to this would be an lte-wifi router. Unfortunately it isn't. I wish we had open source modern lte hardware, but it's not just that we haven't got any open source stuff. There is barely any commercial stuff either. Qualcomm seems the only company I'm able to find that makes lte cat 20 hardware, let alone cat 24. I wonder why. Wouldn't open source hardware projects like limesdr have the resources necessary…

There are some opensource LTE UE stacks, for example srsRAN has one. Legalities aside, it can in theory connect to a public network using an USB sim card reader (or a software sim emulator if you know the required keys). For a stationary node you should get more or less the same performance as good LTE dongle, but dynamic applications will perform very bad.

Unlike WiFi, LTE allows quite high latencies, so the host computer can do all computations, no real need for FPGA code.

For WiFi you have OpenWiFi: https://github.com/open-sdr/openwifi It currently has 11ac support and WiFi6E is in development. Operation on 2.4GHz can be a bit confusing due to lack of 11b support but on 5 or 6GHz it 'just works' (though note lack of DFS support).

Re: Building a freedom-friendly WiFi pocket-router (2020)

#58

The usecase of providing ethernet to devices without wireless makes sense. I also hear about travel usecases for these, even for devices with wireless which I don't understand. Some cite security, which I don't understand. Which device's security depends on the network to provide security? Are they weak on 4G? Some cite avoiding captive portals. Are they that annoying that it's worth maintaining and carrying a travel…

Not specific to travel, but ethernet avoids https://www.google.com/search?q=wifi+baseband+vulnerability For those traveling with multiple devices, it's faster to connect one router to a transient network, than to connect N devices. A travel router can VPN back to home network, e.g. via Tailscale, https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-mt3000/

How does the travel router differ from an Android mobile hotspot, it can work over USB, Wi-Fi, and Ethernet if you have an adapter, you can configure a VPN on it and have hotspot clients use it, and it's always ready with a cellular or Wi-Fi connection

Re: Building a freedom-friendly WiFi pocket-router (2020)

#59

I think it's also worth looking at mikrotik. I run a HAP ac2 for travel which is small, has dual Wi-Fi radios, and enough power for good speeds on IPsec VPN. It also supports wireguard. They also have a tiny, less powerful unit (mAP) that may fit with some travel use cases.

Can you link to the exact product or at least give an easier way for us readers to end up with the right product page :)?

https://mikrotik.com/product/hap_ac2

Mikrotik's product names are sufficient to uniquely identify them and easily searchable. This differs from many hardware vendors, so your question was reasonable, despite already having what you asked for from the prior poster.

Re: Building a freedom-friendly WiFi pocket-router (2020)

#60
There was a project back in 2013 called PORTAL. "Personal Onion Router to Assure Liberty". It used a GL.iNet travel router. At that time, there were no model numbers. I bought one ($18 on the 'Zon), and upgraded the flash to 64GB.

The company noticed that 1) folks were upgrading storage, and 2) hackers were adding pins so they could connect to the serial port. They then modified their production to include both of those hacks. They called it the "6416".

I've gone on to buy many of the GL.iNet devices. I take a Brume with me on travel. Their built-in software (OpenWRT with a custom WebGUI) is so handy that, despite knowing they have anti-features built in, I just use it as-is. I normally use it's 802.11ac radio to connect to the hotel, and copper Ethernet to my machine. But with dual antennas, you can also connect wirelessly without going half-duplex.

That DIY 6416? I use it as my home WAP, configured as a bridge to my central switch. It's been running 24/7 since 2015 or so.

GL.iNet also make an open-source hardware design. So if you're uber-paranoid, you can build your own.

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