Your Cheap Home Router Has a Hidden CLI — Here's How I Found It

🏚️ Chapter 1: The Budget Let me set the scene. Most of us don't get to choose our router. Your ISP comes to your house, puts a white plastic box on the wall, gives you a paper with the WiFi password, and leaves. That's it. That's your whole network now. My box was a Huawei HG8240 . A GPON terminal. This kind of device exists in millions of homes across Asia, the Middle East, South America — anywhere ISPs buy hardware in bulk and give it away for almost nothing. It's cheap. And it looks cheap too. The Web UI: A Beautiful Prison Every router comes with a web UI. You open a browser, type an IP address, and you get an admin panel. Fine. But here's what nobody tells you: the web UI doesn't show you everything your router can do . You get WiFi settings, a MAC filter table, maybe port forwarding if you're lucky. The rest — advanced routing, VLAN management, QoS controls, real firewall rules, diagnostics — is either hidden behind an "advanced" tab that barely works, or just not there at all. A