Networking at home

Beelink MiniMX is an Adnroid TV box, back from 2016, containing S905 system chip, 1 Giga RAM, 8 Giga eMMC, HDMI output, 2 USB 2.0 ports and a Gigabit ethernet. The original Android system which was shipped with the device, was very buggy, but even today you can upgrade the operating system to Linux. In this blog, we will show how you can install Ubuntu based Armbian linux on it, and how to make use of it as a desktop computer.

I have been using my Lenovo P70A for almost one year until now, but recently I get more and more feedback from my partners, that they do not hear what I am saying, when we are talking over the phone. This is some kind of audio problem of the phone, so I thought that this can be fixed by upgrading the firmware of the phone,  so I started to experiment with custom firmware. In this blog I explain all the details of upgrading firmware, making backup of your actual firmware and data, and about the tools related to the firmware upgrading.

It is very easy to back up an MTK based phone with SP Flash Tool, but restoring is not so easy. For older chip versions MTKDroidTools was an automatic tool, but with newer ones it is not working anymore. Keep reading, to learn, how to create a flashable image from the backup you made with SP Flash Tool.

If you have one of these modems you may have encountered the problem, that on first try your USB 3G modem is working very well, and later it is not working at all. In this post I will explain a very easy trick, on how to fix this issue.

The MPR-L8 is very nice and cheap mini router, having also an USB port and a built in battery. From the factory it has a very capable firmware, providing support for 3G dongles for mobile internet sharing, media and file sharing from USB devices and compared to its very small size has all the filtering and port forwarding functions, that normal sized routers provide. Unfortunately the factory firmware is not very stable and we may want to add additional functionality like support for 4G modems or use it as an OpenVPN client to connect easily to home network from any location. All this is possible by flashing an OpenWRT firmware and setting it up according to our needs.

This post is about experiences with hacking into the MPR-L8 and my attempts to install modified firmware to the router. At the end of the post there will be links to the simply uploadable OpenWrt firmware along with the original firmware to be able to restore the router.

Recently I bought some used Netgear 300 M routers for a very affordable price and I have checked a bit of the internal structure of the SW that came with that router. It was very interesting to look at the architecture of this software as it was quite different from the one found on W25. The first positive surprise is that Netgear provides the complete build environment for the router with a lot of source codes and instructions on how to build the firmware. I have actually not tried to build the firmware, but when checking the details of the operation I could find all the relevant source files. As far I know Ericsson has never released the source code of the W25, probably violating the GNU licence of lot of its components. On the other side the structure of the W25 is much nicer, it is like a mini linux machine keeping most of the conventions of the desktop linux operating systems. The configuration is stored in the /etc directory, the standard tools to set up the netwo...

Sometimes you may want to read all the files on your router on a desctop computer, you can do it the following way: Somehow get the binary content of the mtb5 partition (if you have cli access to the router you can use hexdump, or if you have access to the bootloader probably there is also a way to do it) Convert it to endiannes with jffs2dump -b -c -e output input Follow the steps here to mount the filesystem: https://wiki.maemo.org/Modifying_the_root_image It seems that jffs2dump is a bit buggy, so you not always can access all the files.

I like very much custom firmware and altrough I have very little experience with it, I like very much reading about it. So here is a list of links to different custom firmware sites: Firmware for MP3 players - RockBox Firmware for Canon cameras - CHDK Firmware for Western Digital Media Players - B-RAD Firmware for Asus O!Play Media Players - MiniModding Firmware for Samsung TVs - SamyGo Firmware for Raidsonic NAS-1000/NAS-2000 NAS devices - NAS2000.org Firmware for routers: DD-WRT OpenWRT Tomato firmware Freetz for AVM FritzBox