Paolo Scaramuzza | Netis WF2419I Router Hacking Diary
I had an old (2014-ish) and cheap (if I recall correctly it cost me around 15-20 €) Netis WF2419I [1] router collecting dust in a cabinet at home. Its performance has always been lackluster with the WiFi connection dropping and restarting every few minutes. I bought it to serve as a guest AP for my dorm while I was studying in Padova. It worked dutifully for a few years there but, after I moved, I've never used it any more and switched to a whole different setup (which I hope to describe in another post) with more powerful hardware.
This router was almost forgotten, until I read an excellent article by George Hilliard [2] about hacking Reolink cameras. I had no plans to use this device in any case, given that it is rather old and crappy. So reading the article was enough to spark my interest in trying to reverse engineer and add as much new functionality as possible to this piece of hardware (or, perhaps, should I say "junk"?). It surely won't be missed if something goes wrong in the process.
As you can see, each goal somewhat depends on the previous one. Moreover, it's my firt time that I try something like this and some of those goals are not easy. Murphy's law gets you every time and I have encountered many roadblocks during this journey. In writing, I will not spare any of the details, including the MANY failed attempts. That's why I'm calling this page a diary.
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