How to install afc2add and other packages without WiFi connection

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

In my last post I explained how to jailbreak your iDevice with iOS 7.x completely offline, but as I said, once you finish the jailbreak process and connect the iPhone to your computer, it won't appear as jailbroken. I mean, you won't be able to see the entire filesystem.. As you might know, you'll need to install afc2add, but you can't do it locally yet (via the Cydia Autoinstall folder or SSH) because you can't access your phone as I explained before.

The solution is to create a Cydia repository locally with the required packages, add that repository to Cydia in your iPhone and install what you need from there, instead of obtaining the packages from internet. You have two options:

  1. Place the repository in your local Web server, and connect your iPhone to an Ad-Hoc WiFi, AP, and enter the URL of your local computer.
  2. Place the repository inside your iPhone, which is faster and does not require connecting to any WiFi at all.

Below is how you can do it using the 2nd alternative. I'll assume that you only want to install afc2add and Erica Utilities, which is a dependency of afc2add:

  1. Create a text file named Packages. The content of this file should be something like this:

    Package: us.scw.afctwoadd
    Name: afc2add
    Version: 1.01
    Architecture: iphoneos-arm
    Description: Package to add afc2 service for USB browsing of filesystem. Adds the afc2 service and reboots the phone, to fix issues for folks unable to use USB browsers (like iPhoneBrowser) with blackra1n.
    Depiction: http://some-url.com
    Author: NetMage scw@scw.us
    Section: System
    Size: 1136
    MD5sum: 624641d8ce8ee0c4035faf1997bf5df6
    Filename: afc2add.deb

    Package: com.ericasadun.utilities
    Name: Erica Utilities
    Version: 1:0.4.2
    Architecture: iphoneos-arm
    Description: A collection of command-line utilities for various purposes.
    Depiction: http://some-url.com
    Homepage: http://modmyi.com/info/ericautilities.php
    Maintainer: Erica Sadun <apptapp@ericasadun.com
    Author: Erica Sadun <apptapp@ericasadun.com
    Section: Utilities
    Sponsor: ModMyi.com http://modmyi.com
    Size: 55410
    MD5sum: 89a3bb9791c2deee6f530773089ee43d
    Filename: erica.deb

    You're basically saying that your repository will contain two packages. Be careful with Size, MD5sum and Filename fields. The size must match the exact size of the file in bytes (du -b file.deb in Linux, or just click on Properties and see the Size field in Windows). The MD5sum field must be the md5 checksum of the file. Finally, the Filename field must match the filename of the .deb files you'll be including in your repository.

  2. Compress the file. Cydia allows multiple formats, but I usually use .bz2. Just run bzip2 -k Packages on Linux. For Windows, you can use 7-Zip or use bzip2 for Windows. You should have a file Packages.bz2 now.

  3. Open iTools or iFunBox and navigate to the Downloads folder (or any other folder you see there, like Books or Purchases).
  4. Copy the Packages.bz2 and all the included .deb files (afc2add.deb and erica.deb in this case).
  5. Open Cydia in your phone and go Manage > Sources.
  6. Add a new source and enter the following URL: file:///var/mobile/Media/Downloads/. Replace Downloads by the folder where you copied the files.
  7. After you add the repository, a new source will appear in the list. Click on it, and you will see the two packages you included.
  8. First install Erica Utilities and then afc2add.
  9. Reboot your phone if it doesn't reboot automatically after installing afc2add.

That's it. You didn't require any internet connection (except for downlading the .deb files) and you now have complete access to your iPhone ;)

By Oscar Mederos, Category: hacks

Tags: ios / jailbreak / hacks /

Comments