so I was gifted a cybera sca-315 vpn router that was slated for ewaste
its a custom x86 intel atom board with 2gb ram sata and a onboard realtek RTL8309G 10/100 switch
the generic builds of openwrt boot and luci comes up but I have no connectivity on the switch ports
where do I start looking for the problem? do I need a custom RTL8309g driver ? GPIO problem?
The switch doesn’t appear to be detected on the kernel boot. How to correct that will depend on how the switch is connected to the pci bus.
There are 3 lan adapters found though - are all of those functional? Or exposed with a port? It may be that the switch is connected to one of those ports.
Might also need a required kernel module, if the switch is directly connected to the SOC, searching doesn’t indicate what that would be.
If it’s gpio connected - then rebuild openwrt with gpio enabled for x86 target and start banging on the gpios until it comes to life.
Just for a start, I would try a full featured (current) Linux Live CD/ USB (Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenSuSE, etc.) - while I don't hold much hope that you'd find switch support there, it's at least worth a try to boot a distribution that enables basically everything there is in the mainline kernel.
A similar issue is apparently with the velocloud edge devices, there a custom igb module implementing MDIO based communication with the switch is needed, I would expect something similar to be necessary for your system (similar, not the same). Custom hardware (even if being based on x86) is never good news, as this would imply that you'd have to spend quite some efforts on driver development first (probably without any documentation to go by). At least try to obtain their GPL sources (if the OEM firmware is using Linux, no such luck with *BSD or other operating systems), which might provide some clues.
While the device has some tempting features (namely the integrated switch), it's also using a rather old Atom E640 (2*1.0 GHz) SOC, with presumably not very much performance and probably around 30 watts idle power consumption (I'm extrapolation from the first generation Atom 230/ N270/ 330 here, maybe I'm off) - so it might be useful to choose your battles wisely…
it does have two mini-pcie slots (2.0?) I could jam a couple 4 port gigabit nics in there and use a mini-pcie to pci-e 4x adapter
would be pretty pointless given the devices age but a interesting experiment
Still worth looking for the vendor sources - the switch has to be connected somehow.
If you have wan1 and 2 live, what output do you get from dmesg when a cable is connected to them? That should assist in identifying which of the 3 interfaces detected on boot is possibly an internal connection to the switch.
little update if i bridge wan1-wan2 and connect wan2 to port 1 of the switch with a cable the switch does work
so I guess that is a bit of bypass but it gets it working