Installing Moblink on BELABOX

Rock 5A / 5B & any RK3588 board — turn a spare phone into an extra bonded uplink

What it does Moblink (specifically moblink-rust) is a Rust reimplementation of the Moblin bonding feature. It lets you use spare devices — like an old Android phone — as extra SRTLA bonding connections, so instead of just your modems you can throw another cellular link into the bond pool.

Easiest option Just want it done? The easy install page runs a single script that performs every step below for you — it downloads the binaries, sets up the services, and checks port 7777. This page is the manual walk-through, for doing it by hand or troubleshooting.

Setup

Get your SSH password

Open http://belabox.local (or your BELABOX IP) in a browser, go to Advanced / Developer, and click Start SSH Server. Note the password shown — you'll need it in the next step.

SSH into your BELABOX

On Windows open PowerShell (or Terminal on Mac/Linux) and run:

ssh user@belabox.local

…or use your IP directly, e.g. ssh user@192.168.X.X. Type yes if asked about the fingerprint, then enter the password from Step 1 — nothing appears as you type, that's normal.

Download the Moblink binaries

Grab the statically linked (musl) builds. These run on any BELABOX regardless of its system version. The upstream one-liner installer is avoided on purpose: on a BELABOX it pulls a glibc build that fails to start with a GLIBC_… not found error.

cd /tmp
TAG=v1.0.0
BASE=https://github.com/datagutt/moblink-rust/releases/download/$TAG
wget -O moblink-streamer      $BASE/moblink-streamer-aarch64-unknown-linux-musl
wget -O moblink-relay-service $BASE/moblink-relay-service-aarch64-unknown-linux-musl
wget -O moblink-relay         $BASE/moblink-relay-aarch64-unknown-linux-musl
chmod +x moblink-streamer moblink-relay-service moblink-relay
sudo mv moblink-streamer      /usr/local/bin/moblink-streamer
sudo mv moblink-relay-service /usr/local/bin/moblink-relay-service
sudo mv moblink-relay         /usr/local/bin/moblink-relay

Create the relay service

sudo tee /etc/systemd/system/moblink-relay-service.service << 'EOF'
[Unit]
Description=Moblink Relay Service
After=network.target
[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/moblink-relay-service --network-interfaces-to-ignore "mob\d+-.*|tailscale.*|docker.*"
Restart=always
User=user
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
EOF

Create the streamer service

sudo tee /etc/systemd/system/moblink-streamer.service << 'EOF'
[Unit]
Description=Moblink Streamer
After=network-online.target
Wants=network-online.target
[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/moblink-streamer --belabox --no-log-timestamps
Restart=always
User=root
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
EOF

Enable and start both services

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable moblink-relay-service moblink-streamer
sudo systemctl start moblink-relay-service moblink-streamer

Verify it's working

sudo ss -tlnp | grep 7777

You should see moblink-streame listening on port 7777. If you do, the pipeline is up.

Connect your Android

Open the Moblink app, then set:

Streamer URL → ws://YOUR_BELABOX_IP:7777
Password → 1234

Hit connect — your phone's connection now joins the bond.

Same network requiredThe phone and your Mushbox must be on the same local network — that's how Moblink discovers the relay and makes the connection. If they're on different networks it won't connect, even with the right IP. (The phone still contributes its own cellular to the bond; it just needs that shared network for the control link.)

Notes & gotchas

Keep relay names shortAround 10 characters or fewer, so mDNS auto-discovery works reliably.

Custom 5A configsIf you run custom configs on your board, confirm the web UI is healthy at belabox.local before you start — Moblink expects the standard BELABOX stack.

Streamer won’t start / nothing on port 7777?Run sudo /usr/local/bin/moblink-streamer --belabox --no-log-timestamps to see the real error. If it says GLIBC_… not found, you have a glibc binary — redo Step 3 to install the musl builds, then sudo systemctl reset-failed moblink-streamer and sudo systemctl start moblink-streamer. A one-off Relay server missing line at startup is harmless — the server still comes up on 7777.

Moblink by datagutt/moblink-rust · guide by Mushbox · mushboxes.com