I got an old Cisco AP and I looked inside!
from Krafting@lemmy.world to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 26 Jun 20:11
https://lemmy.world/post/16959258

cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/16959253

I got this AP for free, and had some fun trying to configure it, and I decided to look at the inside of this thing. It has a PowerPC processor, pretty cool!

It is a Cisco Aironet 1131AG

More pics:

It’s an old AP from around 2007, I managed to get the latest firmware thanks to some guy on the Internet Archive (thank god they exists) ! ( archive.org/download/cIOS-firmware-images/ )

#selfhosted

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user224@lemmy.sdf.org on 26 Jun 20:19 next collapse

By the way, with some not so ancient devices you can search for the firmware here: software.cisco.com/download/home and at least get MD5 and SHA-512 hashes to verify the files you downloaded.

Not the case with this AP though.

Edit: Oh, I almost forgot. Also the exact filename. Makes it easy finding it online.

Krafting@lemmy.world on 26 Jun 20:29 collapse

Of course and I tried to search it, didn’t find the download on the Cisco website sadly, nor the md5sum for this specific file, I found some other sums tho.

Cisco has a tendancy to remove download or block them behing an account with a licence…

lnxtx@feddit.nl on 26 Jun 21:15 next collapse

If you surprised why it has a PowerPC CPU. It’s actually a SoC.
From the manual:

AMCC PowerPC 405 32-bit RISC processor core operating up to 333MHz with 16KB D-and I-caches.

Designed specifically to address embedded applications, the PowerPC 405EP (PPC405EP), provides a high-performance, low-power solution that interfaces to a wide range of peripherals by incorporating on-chip power management features and lower power dissipation requirements.

Ebby@lemmy.ssba.com on 26 Jun 23:27 collapse

Sweet! My first computer was a 333mhz PowerPC Mac! Still have that behemoth. Man, I learned video editing and 3d modelind on that thing and totally changed my career path.

Now 25 years later it’s decendant (roughly?) is a SoC running a wireless hub!

debounced@kbin.run on 26 Jun 21:57 next collapse

hard to say for sure, but U109 and U208 could be UART into those Cisco baseband or radio chips. one placement for the 2.4 GHz (G) and 5 GHz (A), respectively. would be interesting to probe around there and see if you get a serial interface to it... obviously for extra credit ;-)

Krafting@lemmy.world on 26 Jun 22:08 collapse

Ooo, that’d be fun, and scary, I never done such a thing, maybe I could look at this some day !

possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip on 27 Jun 00:33 collapse

Why something that old? WiFi standards move on and so does security.

However, if it isn’t Broadcom you probably can get OpenWRT running

Krafting@lemmy.world on 27 Jun 07:17 collapse

Why not, old hardware can ne really cool you know! It’s not for running 24/7 of course, just to sée what once was a cool and expensive product

possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip on 27 Jun 14:19 collapse

Not for WiFi. You can get a cheap WiFi 5 device that will work way better. Just flash Openwrt to a supported device and you are golden.