Internet in a Box | Hacker News Reader

Internet in a Box

revk.uk

102 pointsmadaxe_again27 comments

I thought this was going to be an article about the Internet-in-a-Box project (which downloads resources such as OSM, wikis, media for free, private, offline use)

http://internet-in-a-box.org/

Still a nice build, though.

The first image is of the "Internet in a Box" from the IT Crowd.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDbyYGrswtg

A cell signal booster is also another useful travel companion. Further, if you have the budget, consider a network bonding device such as https://teradek.com/collections/link-pro-family. I use these at trade shows (not this device but something similar) and it's really quite incredible how good service you can get and not have to pay through the nose to the trade show service provider for an ethernet connection.

Any particular reason you linked to Teradek instead of the one that you use? I'm very interested in something like this for trade shows and on-site demos.

We made our own, it's not something we have public but it's similar in concept to the Teradek or Viprinet.

Cute. I’ve resorted to taking a tiny OpenWRT router with me on trips to do pretty much the same (intend to switch to WireGuard on the next trip).

Can you provide more info about your setup?

These travel routers [0] [1] support OpenWRT and/or Wireguard, as client and server. They also support connectng to captive portal WiFi networks so they're perfect for travel.

[0] https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-ar750s/

https://openwrt.org/toh/gl.inet/gl-ar750

[1] https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-ar300m/

https://openwrt.org/toh/gl.inet/gl.inet_gl-ar300m

Sure, it’s a NeXX 3020: https://openwrt.org/toh/nexx/wt3020

I have two of them, and use one as a Wi-Fi client/NAT/VPN gateway/ad blocker when I’m at customers and some hotels.

Setup is pretty trivial, you can do a lot with LuCI and the OpenWRT packages.

I write code on the internet every day, and I understood 0% of that article. Abstraction is a powerful thing.

Adrian is very smart! I did a TCP/IP and Firebrick course with him a few (cough over 10) years ago and I learned more in a few days than I did in a year at college.

He set up his own ISP in the UK, and built all the core routers himself, including designing the hardware and writing the router software - see www.firebrick.co.uk

One of the purposes appears to be to connect to the cruise ship's (expensive) wifi as client, as a single fixed MAC address, and rebroadcast a local wifi signal you control to more than 1 device. Because the cruise company wants you to pay per device.

Also to have a small router you control to monitor the data usage per device, and cumulative data usage on the wifi-WAN-uplink interface. And to establish a whole-router VPN tunnel if you want.

That's what I would have assumed, but he was explicit that he already pays per device:

"To be clear, this is not stealing internet service - it is expensive and we pay for the premium, unlimited, steaming package for multiple devices."

> mostly holiday, but also some work

> This is obviously somewhat overkill, so worth some explanation...

The author doesn't make it immediately obvious why they chose the particular components and why the overkill, especially for something that is so rarely used and is not aimed at enterprise scenarios. It comes at quite the cost. The FireBrick alone is £500+VAT and as far as I can tell the 3 Aruba boxes together easily cost even more. That's at least $1500 worth of equipment in the Internet Box. Couldn't the same result (within reason) be achieved with something substantially cheaper? Like a travel router, maybe combined with a RPi if needed? Of course you wouldn't really get anything close to "enterprise" but then again the occasional vacation cruise doesn't seem to beg for such features.

His company makes the FireBrick. Having one along on the cruise allows him to develop for it as well.

For him I understand, I read the comment above that made this clear. I was wondering how much sense it makes for the rest of the readers. And it's not just the FireBrick but the entire setup that is vastly overspecced for the purpose, which would be "internet on vacation cruise" rather than "product development".

> Couldn't the same result (within reason) be achieved with something substantially cheaper

Yep, for example this $20 router running OpenWRT can accomplish the same: https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-ar150/

I'm finding it a little hard to discern to purpose of this. Is it to circumvent wifi restrictions on a cruise ship?

Flight and plane wifi generally charge per device, block things like UDP and ICMP that break the internet, filter and MITM websites, including MITMing HTTPS, only allowing port 80/443, all sorts of horrendous malicious/hostile things.

Kept thinking about that old software bundle by Spry, "Internet in a Box" (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/10/openi...)

For those that don’t know, Royal Caribbean charges approx. $20/device/day for their all-out streaming package. They claim it’s faster than normal land based Ethernet but I’d say that’s a BIG LIE. It’s more like having an ISDN...aka 4x faster than a standard dialup modem. Such a sham!

The power injectors seem superfluous, the 330H and 501 both have standard AC adapters available. Also the 303H isn't directional (page 7 https://www.arubanetworks.com/assets/ds/DS_AP303H.pdf) so having one at each end of the case wouldn't be needed if you rearranged things so both sides of the AP had a clear path.

Would be interesting to see the configuration of the FB2900, sounds like there is a lot going on in there!

Having PoE powered devices often lets you place things in more creative locations, than the need to put things near an AC wall outlet. In certain cruise ship cabins I imagine that optimal placement for wifi signal may not be near where the wall outlets are located.

Off-topic, but I can't stand cookie banners that link to Google policy documents.

Ironically it's the only way I end up leaking info to Google

Can't you preload the content you want to watch on Netflix and similar?

If you’re able to perfectly predict your preferences for every given moment of the period you’re on a cruise or in the air in advance, then you could. I find I am unable to do so.

I agree that we are getting closer to archived data consumption (vs requiring Internet access) and we'll pack a "data suitcase" prior to extended trips or errands.

I guess it could be considered brown-bagging your Internet diet when you're on the go.

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