Tag Archives: Android

Advertise a metered network to Android devices with Router OS

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Due to an unplanned outage of my main ISP, I had to get a mobile data SIM in a hurry, to use as an LTE backup uplink for my Mikrotik hAP ac3 (the whole setup of which I’ll describe one day). Given the price discrepancy of those, I wanted to make every transferred byte count: No unnecessary update fetching or immediate download of high-res sepia-toned photos of bulldogs in tutus.

Android can advertise itself as a metered network to its (Android) clients, so how do I do the same with Router OS 7?

(router agnostic) tl;dr:

  1. Make DHCP Option 43 (Vendor-Specific Option) contain the string ANDROID_METERED;
  2. The option should be sent even if not requested by the client (not standard compliant, but doesn’t hurt).
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Unified password management, the UNIX way

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I’ve long been meaning to store all my passwords in a single, safe, location, as a way to remain sane as well as safe. But which one? Every operating system (or desktop environment) now has its own store, but choosing one casts a lot of things into stone, and most have a lot of third-party dependencies.

KeePass seems to be a good cross-platform solution, with clients for Linux, Windows, OS X and even Android, and nice features such as filling on demand. But I don’t like the whole clicky interface, if only for use without graphical display. It also doesn’t offer a native way to synchronise the stores across boxes.

For a while, I have been storing all my important configuration files in a git repository, with some make magic to install and update the files on the system. This magic would also store all passwords in a GPG-encrypted files, and replace them when installing the files.

The problem, of course, is that the passwords are still in plaintext in the live systems. And it came back to bite me when I sent an innocuous script (the ics2dav.sh script from this post) to a friend… with the password nicely sitting there. Fortunately, I noticed this before him, and changed my password. In addition, this doesn’t cater for passwords stored in other applications, such as Firefox.

So things had to change. And I discovered pass(1), a simple command-line tool based on GPG-encrypted flat files, with an option to sync natively with Git. So there is finally an option for me to store passwords in a way which fits my workflow.
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