XiaoMi Camera BS region locking fix

CS // 19 Sep 2016 // Comments Off on XiaoMi Camera BS region locking fix

小米 sells a small little wifi camera which works quite painlessly.
I’ve bought several over the last few years.

My recent ones don’t work oversea’s though (which is where I install them).
Its extremely bogus selling equipment that is limited to a country, especially when they don’t tell you about it.

Annoying, as my older models aren’t “region locked”, but the newer ones are.

There is a fix for it, although it will likely get more difficult to patch at xiaomi’s whim.
If so, I’ll probably stop buying the camera’s. Lovely how vendors want to mess with customers…

—

First up, enable telnet on the camera.
Get an SD card or take the card out of the camera.

Create a folder named test on the card.
Create a plain text file called equip_test.sh in that folder, and add the following bash script:


#!/bin/sh
# Telnet
if [ ! -f "/etc/init.d/S88telnet" ]; then
echo "#!/bin/sh" > /etc/init.d/S88telnet
echo "telnetd &" >> /etc/init.d/S88telnet
chmod 755 /etc/init.d/S88telnet
fi
dr=`dirname $0`
# fix bootcycle
mv $dr/equip_test.sh $dr/equip_test.sh.moved
reboot

The script will enable telnet on the camera, and then rename the script so it doesn’t run again on the next boot.

Stick the prepared card into the camera, power on, and it should reboot (twice).
If you check the open ports on the camera ip you should now see port 23 (telnet) is open.

Login with the default user/pass (as below) via telnet

User: root
Password: 1234qwer


Once telnet’d in, enter the following, line by line –

Find and kill the watchdog process

killall watch_process


Find and kill /home/cloud process so we can edit it without the watchdog watch_process restarting it

killall cloud


Change the check within /home/cloud executable to query a fake domain so it never returns a failure, then reboot.


sed -i 's|api.xiaoyi.com/v4/ipc/check_did|api.xiaoyi.foo/v4/ipc/check_did|g' /home/cloud
reboot


Notes – The camera checks for the country by running an executable called /home/cloud
This calls an api at api.xiaoyi.com which does a ip check, then returns a true or false value if it thinks you’re in China or not. We change the /home/cloud executable ip check call to a bad url, which means it can’t perform its check.

Worked on my camera’s running version 1.8.6.1Q_201607271501