skaulana

Did you sign up with Surfline Ghana as part of their Surfprise promotion, enticed by the offer of a free Mi-Fi hotspot that you could use even if you decided to change providers in the future?

Unfortunately, it turns out, Surfline cripples the power of the Huawei E5372 they so freely gave you - not just by locking the device to their carrier, but by removing its ability to connect to radio bands not used by its network. Not so useful that "the device is yours forever" with such anti-customer behavior in place!

Since they won't help us, let's help ourselves:

The trick is called debranding

If you buy a "stock" Huawei E5372 you'll see it play nicely on pretty much any network because the excellent hardware inside supports many 3G and 4G bands. Surfline's firmware intentionally removes these capabilities, so we'll use the magic of software to bring your Mi-Fi back to its stock configuration.

skaulana

First off, props to robmoggach for creating a script that attempts to do the job, however I'm working on a Meteor app that requires Mongo and found that the script wasn't setting everything up to completion. Here's an attempt to catalog all the steps I performed, in the hopes it might save someone a bit of headache someday:

1. Use the WebFaction web dashboard to provision your app directories

• Log in, go to Domains/Websites > Applications, click to add a new application
• Name this one for your Meteor app (for the rest of this doc let's use myapp as your moniker), e.g. myappmeteor
• Change the app category to Custom, type to Custom websockets app (listening on port), check to open a port in the firewall
• Save and note the port number you get (let's say it's 20000, you'll need this later)
• Click to add a second application
• Name this one for the Mong