How To Get Remote Access to Your Hotspot

How do you man­age your Hotspot if it’s at some­one else’s loca­tion? Whether there’s a for­mal “Host Agree­ment” or it’s your Aunt Sal­ly, hav­ing the abil­i­ty to remote in to your Hotspot’s dash­board and do any­thing from a quick check on the lat­est trans­ac­tions all the way to a reset or reboot, it’s nice to have that ability. 

I’ve been using remote.it to do this since I began putting Hotspots in remote loca­tions. Here’s how it works in broad strokes.

Every Hotspot is con­nect­ed to a router. Most routers in the home are actu­al­ly a com­bi­na­tion of modem and router, and are more or less locked; you can’t add new soft­ware like remote.it to them. What you CAN do is add anoth­er router that is more con­fig­urable, put remote.it on the extra router, and then cre­ate a con­nec­tion from that 2nd router to your Hotspot. It sounds com­pli­cat­ed, but it’s real­ly pret­ty easy. Let’s walk through how to do it.

Oh, before we do, you should know about the upfront costs and lim­i­ta­tions. The extra router is around $30 on Ama­zon. The remote.it ser­vice is free for up to 5 “devices” (aka Hotspots) and after that is $5/month for an unlim­it­ed amount of Hotspots. Until man­u­fac­tur­ers start includ­ing remote access to each Hotspot’s dash­board, this is a no-brain­er if you want to be able to con­nect to your Hotspot remote­ly. Final­ly, if your Hotspot does­n’t have a Dash­board, hav­ing remote access does­n’t mat­ter much.

Ok, let’s start with a dia­gram show­ing what it looks like. If we want­ed to be fan­cy, we could call this your net­work “topol­o­gy”. It’s basi­cal­ly a map of your home net­work, from modem to router to all the devices you might have con­nect­ed to the inter­net in your home. We’ll focus on the specifics of the Hotspot con­nec­tion here, but I’ve added a bunch of oth­er devices just so you get a feel for the big picture.

First you’ll have to order a Man­go. Like I said, ~$30 or so on Ama­zon. This’ll work with any router based on the Open­WRT Lin­ux dis­tri­b­u­tion, but for this tuto­r­i­al we’ll use the Mango.

While you’re wait­ing for it to arrive, open up a remote.it account, which is free to open.

Once the Man­go arrives you’re ready to begin.

On Remote.it, you’re going to gen­er­ate a “com­mand line install com­mand”. This sounds scary, but if you can click your mouse and fol­low direc­tions you’ll be fine. 🙂

Log in to your Remote.it account.

Hit the blue plus but­ton to “Add A Device”, then choose “Lin­ux & Rasp­ber­ry Pi”.

That will bring up a code for you to copy. You can copy it now or come back to it lat­er, but leave this tab open. You’re going to need that com­mand (the thing start­ing with R3_REGISTRATION...etc) lat­er.

Over on the Man­go, plug in pow­er, then con­nect your Man­go to your router with an eth­er­net cable. Use the WAN port on the Man­go, and any LAN port on your router. 

Pow­er up the Man­go. It’ll start broad­cast­ing a WiFi net­work, which you’ll join using your computer.

• Look for the Wi-Fi net­work on your com­put­er, it’ll be some­thing like “GL-MT200N-V2-xxx”.
• Open a brows­er and go to http://192.168.8.1 That address should be on the back of the Man­go box, and the pass­word (which is prob­a­bly goodlife, should also be there. Sign in. I think it made me change my pass­word right away.
• Open up the Ter­mi­nal app if you’re on a Mac, or for Win­dows, an “ssh client” like Put­ty (or what­ev­er you use for com­mand line).

• In your com­mand line app, con­nect to the Man­go using this com­mand: ssh root@192.168.8.1 Again, the default pass­word is goodlife if you haven’t changed it.
• Now that you’re logged in to the Man­go com­mand line on Ter­mi­nal, take the com­mand you copied from the Remote.it web­site (R3_Registration-blah-blah-blah), paste that into your com­mand line, then hit Enter. 

• It’ll spit out a bunch of code. I always feel like a super secret hack­er when this hap­pens. You don’t need to do any­thing, just watch the Matrix work. :). It’s con­nect­ing your Remote.it account to your Mango. 
• Once it’s done and you see anoth­er com­mand prompt, type in exit, then hit Enter, then close the Ter­mi­nal app.

• Wait a few min­utes, then look in your Remote.it account and you’ll see the Man­go in your account.

• Now your Man­go is con­nect­ed to Remote.it. The next step is to tell the Man­go which device (your Hotspot) you want it to keep a line open to.
• To do that, you’ll need to find the local IP address of your min­er. To find that, you’ll need to log in to your reg­u­lar router. Google your router name and “find device IP list” to do this. It’ll take some time. Just go slow and fol­low those direc­tions. Your list MAY look some­thing like this.

• You’ll see a list of all the devices in your home on your router, from your print­er to your com­put­er to smart fridges. You’re look­ing for the min­er’s IP address. It’ll be some­thing like 192.168.1.xxx.
• Now, back on the remote.it app, select your Man­go, and under the Ser­vices col­umn, click the + but­ton to “Add Service”.
• Leave the Ser­vice Type as TCP.
• Change the Ser­vice Name to what­ev­er you’d like, say, “MyRe­moteM­iner­Ac­cess” or whatever.
• Set the Ser­vice Port to 80.
• In Ser­vice Host Address, paste in your min­er’s IP you just found on your home router.
• Enable ser­vice, and Save. 

• Wait for a minute or so and you’ll see it appear in the Ser­vices column. 

• You’re done! Now, from any­where in the world you can log into your Remote.it account, select the Man­go your Hotspot is attached to, click on the Ser­vice you just set up, then hit “Con­nect”.
• You’ll see it say “Start­ing”, then in the bot­tom right cor­ner of the blue sec­tion look for an arrow with “Launch”. Click Launch, and you’re in!

This is what that the Bob­cat dash­board looks like, as an example:

Secu­ri­ty con­cerns: If you want to get geeky, you can put the Man­go on a dif­fer­ent sub­net on your net­work. I would­n’t wor­ry about that com­plex­i­ty, but if you or your hosts are extra con­cerned about secu­ri­ty, Google how to set­up sub­nets on your router.

That’s it, you’re all set up with the Man­go and remote access to your Hotspot’s dash­board. Rock on!

Remote.it + Man­go Benefits

• Mon­i­tor online/offline sta­tus for your min­er in real time from anywhere.
• Check the sta­bil­i­ty of your min­er’s inter­net con­nec­tion over time.
• When using a cel­lu­lar router con­nect to your min­er and Man­go, the data plan usage of remote.it (NOT your Hotspot)will be ~2MB per month to main­tain an on-demand con­nec­tion to your Min­er. $49/year unlim­it­ed slow data (T‑mobile card).
• Get to the web inter­face of your min­er. This ONLY works with Hotspots that have a web inter­face (like Bobcat).

Oh, one more poten­tial­ly hot tip (that I haven’t test­ed). The good peo­ple at Remote.it have point­ed me in the direc­tion of a T‑Mobile SIM card that runs $49/year with unlim­it­ed data. Even though it’s gawd-awful slow (64kbps), that *should­n’t* mat­ter for Light Hotspots which should be below 1.4kbps. Your mileage may vary, but for the record, here it is.