A technical blog post

Hey! Axel here and yup, we’re getting nerdy! You have been warned!

Since we both ended up being sick when we were to record yesterday’s podcast, I felt and still do feel bad about not posting an episode and giving content where content is due, so I am going to talk about something here that wouldn’t belong in the podcast.

A Huawei router

Yes, we have a Huawei router here on the bus, a 4G+ router. The Huawei B535-333 to be exact. It’s a fine router that offers additional ports for antennas, it supports 4G and more. It runs on 12V itself so I was able to cut off the 220V charger and connect the barrel plug-ended cable straight to the 12V rail in the bus.

And since I’m a tinkerer I thought I’d put in a PiHole here as a separate Raspberry Pi Zero W machine. The only problem I was having was that the WebUI of the router didn’t offer me a chance to change the DNS server supplied within the DHCP settings. For many days I went all over the WebUI to search and look for it, but I couldn’t find it anywhere!

Well after some searching online I finally found this article from 2021 where it shows that the option is actually hidden in the UI and you have to do a little Javascript trickery in the console of the browser to make the UI display it at all!

Here the DNS settings are hidden, this is the default view

So, since I am using a MacBook Pro running the latest MacOS and my main browser is Firefox (I highly recommend it!) I did what the site told me to do, open the browser, log into the router’s webpage and find the DHCP settings (it’s under Advanced -> Router -> DHCP). There I opened up Firefox’s console by pressing: “Command + Option + K”.

The view of the settings and the web console

In the console, you have to write:

$('#dhcp_dns').show();

Then after you press enter you will see the new option appear where you can select to provide your own DNS servers.

Surprise surprise, hidden DNS settings for DHCP!

After you set your own DNS servers all you need to do is click “Save” and then reboot the router after that.

Afterthought

I am still testing this out, if I display the hidden settings again after the reboot they still say that the only DNS server in use is the router itself, but I went through the modification and I am now waiting for 24 hours to see if the new DNS settings I put in will be deployed to any other devices on our LAN/WiFi.

This is a stupid thing to hide from users since you often want to use things like PiHole, a local DNS server for the local LAN and more. So I’m not quite sure why on earth Huawei would hide this option like this.
Even if it was displayed by default, not a lot of users would fiddle with this unless they actually needed it.

But that’s my 2 cents.