2018-09-17
During my university vacation, I was most of the time in a little village, where the only source of Internet comes from my phone. Previously, my family used a portable hotspot; more specifically, the Vodafone’s R216-z:
Meanwhile, we changed plans, and now we do not have a hotspot to take with us. However, during the vacations I thought that maybe, I could reuse the hotspot to create a mobile personal network, where I could connect the Raspberry Pi server and then work, with all the conveniences of having a “remote” git repo, or IRC chat, etc.
So, I went looking for the R216-z, and started messing around it. Some notes:
Supports at most 10 concurrent connections
The two antennas can function in both frequencies available (2.4 and 5 GHz), but not at the same time
It has MAC-based white- and black-listing
It does not support reserving IP addresses to certain MACs. Also, it can have DHCP on or off.
It does have NAT and DMZ functions, specified through IPs.
It seems it can support IPv6, but no options are visible in the web interface, only for the connection hotspot <--> Internet
It is linux based (3.XX kernel), and has a whooping 256 MB of RAM.
The web interface uses an ancient version of JQuery, and all the information is retrieved using AJAX requests, and links are Javascript based.
According to nmap, it has port 22 filtered, and both port 53 (DNS) and port 80 (web interface) open.
The biggest limitation for me is the point number 4, because it means I cannot know what is the IP address of the server. One way to get that information is through AJAX requests, but I could not find any documentation regarding endpoints and possible requests. So, I intend to comb through a 1000+ lines of Javascript spaghetti to find and document those endpoints. Also, I’ll see what is possible to do about the SSH access, it would be sweet to gain direct access to the OS.
