Use of cell phone wifi hotspot as gateway for asuswrt...

[SnakeByte]

I think this should be possible, but thought I'd ask here before digging in further...

When the internet goes down (Ethernet Wan port) it would be nice if I could configure the router to use my iphone's hotspot via wifi as a backup gateway. Recent ASUS routers have two wifi configurations (2.4 and 5ghz). What I'd like to do is reconfigure one of those to stop being something that clients connect to and instead have it be a client that connects to the iphone. Then use that wireless interface as the new gateway.

Has anyone tried something like this?

 

[RMerlin]

You cannot configure the router as a Wireless client over the webui. You would have to manually configure everything yourself over SSH. To my knowledge, no one has attempted this so far.

You might have better luck testing your phone in USB tethering mode.

 

[SnakeByte]

The iPhone 6+ wasn't detected by the asus router when I plugged it into the USB2 port. The iPhone even prompted me to "trust" the device, which I said "yes" to, but that didn't help. Any suggestions?

In the meantime, I'm using a wireless to ethernet bridge. That works somewhat well enough... however there are some wan failover issues that I've ran into:

1. The internet gateway device (att u-verse) has decided to answer all web requests with friendly "cannot connect" messages instead of just letting things fail. This seems to break the asus detection that the internet is, in fact, down. Perhaps the code should attempt to download something like a single pixel image and compare results with what is actually downloaded?

2. Disconnecting the wan cable forces the failover after a while (I say this because I have to wait for the ASUS 'Wan Cable Disconnect' spoofed page to go away instead of it failing over immediately), however, it seems that at least once so far, the fallback function gets confused since it fell back even when the wan port was still disconnected.

Btw, is there a way to disable those ASUS's web spoofing messages?