Comment by xiii1408 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xiii1408 | Hacker News Reader

My grandmom legit still uses Netscape dial-up as her ISP. She lives in a very rural county in Tennessee, and there are no DSL, cable, or fiber options. Her house is unfortunately also down in a valley, so there's no cell phone reception, although there's reasonable 5G service if you walk up to the top of a nearby hill. Perhaps Skylink will be an option soon, although not yet.

My parents bought her a Kindle a while back, which is difficult to use without WiFi internet access, although it doesn't require much bandwidth. I actually made her a dial-up WiFi router using an RPi, USB WiFi and dial-up modem adapters so that she can create a WiFi network off of her dial-up connection to download e-books. My friends helped me use the GPIO to set up a nice, user-friendly button to connect and disconnect the dial-up connection, as well as a notification light to signal whether the dial-up is connected, connecting, or off. (Remember you can't leave dial-up on all the time, since you want to receive or place calls using your landline sometimes.)

Actually, the hardest part of the whole thing was getting the dial-up connection working with an open-source Linux client instead of Netscape's proprietary Windows client. I ended up having to use VirtualBox and some Linux FIFO's to listen in on what the proprietary windows client was doing when connecting. In case anyone else happens to come upon this problem: the proprietary Netscape client lowercases the password before sending it over the wire. :P

I would make a deal with a friend or neighbor who gets 5G reception on top of the hill. Connect a 5G modem to a Ubiquiti point-to-point antenna set that beams the connection to the house at the bottom (they have different products depending on the distance).

That may violate the TOS of the original connection but probably wouldn’t come up.

Have you missed all the recent chatter about Ubiquiti? I'd steer well clear and look at other options such as MicroTik et al.

Have you seen the chatter about MikroTik vulnerabilities as well? Everybody has security incidents. What matters is how you handle them.

The last breach was not handled really well by Ubiquiti.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/04/ubiquiti-all-but-confirm...

Indeed, but if you don't put everything to the cloud and consider Ubiquiti as an HW manufacturer: they're pretty good

That is getting harder and harder. E.g. Unifi Video has a great on prem software to manage their video devices on your own devices but was depreciated in favour of a cloud based solution. At least MicroTik has so far steered clear of cloud solutions.

> That may violate the TOS of the original connection but probably wouldn’t come up.

How? If that were true, WiFi range extenders would violate TOS as well.

WiFi range extenders usually implies same home and same family members and not the house down the hill so neighbors don’t need to pay their own. It’s a bit absurd though since that house wouldn’t be able to pay their own in this case.

> How? If that were true, WiFi range extenders would violate TOS as well.

A WiFi extender just repeats the same network with same security, SSID and access password. It doesn't extend connection to third parties.

Similarly, if I have a large property with a large land, I can spread the network to every part of the land with the equipment of my choosing and no one would say anything unless I allow third parties unfettered permanent access to said network.

Same password, yes. But you can alter the SSID, on WEP at least, last time I checked.

You can always alter the SSID & password and present it as a completely different network (even you can run a different DHCP to make it a subnet effectively). However, when you keep the SSID the same, your devices can roam much easier.

In fact, WiFi has a roaming standard and latest devices can utilize this for mesh-like handoff without a central controller.

Recent laptops and phones handle it relatively well, it seems.

The WiFI extender I used could not change the passphrase.

Mine (a TP-Link RE-200) can do anything you want with it. If you add it to a OneMesh network, these settings are (sensibly) disabled and synced from the root node (the router).

Mine, TP-Link from 2013 could definetely not do this : I assume because it just retransmitted the packets and did not have the horsepower to do a decrypt+recrypt.

Probably. SoC based devices improved explosively in the last 5 years.

Ignoring all the problems you had, this is so sweet I can't stand it - your grandmom has an excellent grand-daughter/son <3

> My grandmom legit still uses Netscape dial-up as her ISP.

I wish all the websites which reasonably can and should would have mandatory lightweight versions optimized for dial-up and comparably slow connections so you could still use your bank, read news, chat (I mean WhatsApp which doesn't even have a PC client app you could install once), download books, book hotels/flights, order stuff from e-shops and online marketplaces etc while on narrowband. Thanks G-d we still have plain old POP3+SMTP e-mail servers and clients still available at least.

Have you considered open sourcing the work you did? Sounds interesting for hobbyists and retro technologists.

If you get time, make a blog post somewhere with this info on it, so other people can find it easily !

Would you consider putting the project up on github?

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