I’ve recently inherited a couple odd wired devices and accesspoints from a friend. They are “Pakedge” branded and consist of a dual wan router with 8 lan ports, an 8 port poe switch, and a wireless lan controller. I’m working towards getting cpu info on them, but everything inside is covered in heat sinks I don’t want to distrub until I can get console access. There is a console port, so I’ll mess with that in a little bit.
The router model is “RK-1” the switch is unmanaged so idk the mode, and the controller is “NK-1”, and the ap is wa-2200.
Anyone know if these are just rebranded “something else’s”? Or are they really custom devices which nobody has heard of before?
According to this they are mostly Aheros-based, so the WA-2200 seems supportable (ipq4019). There is no info about the NK-1 and RK-1, though.
The router and the controller both seem to be running the cavium octeon cn7020-aap at 1.2ghz, and some Linux build with kernel 3.10.87. It’s definitely running Linux already and shows full console boot log when booting.
Oh...
I'm trying to get an Avaya (Xirrus) AP with the very same chipset up and running for half a year now, but I'm experiencing problems with the PCIe driver, preventing WiFi from working. That might not be an issue on a router/controller without WiFi.
Booting an initramfs build was straight forward and went without bigger issues.
1 Like
With my available time, and the rarity of this hardware it might as well be e-waste I guess.
I could help You port the WA-2200 access point, since I did support for WR-1. It has similar SoC and probably recovery procedure, but we'll need serial console attached to it, to see what's going on booting. UART is probably exposed here:
You'll need an UART adapter to access it, something like this https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00LODGRV8. Cheaper ones can also be found.
1 Like
I have a UART console somewhere from my other endeavors. Honestly I was hoping I could get openwrt running on the wired boxes more than the AP's, but they do seem like decent devices, maybe I can get some time to mess with the console soon. The wired boxes expose the bootloader directly on the console port, but they have some obscure Octeon processor which might be hard to get working.
I might have even left them alone if the controller that came with them wasn't just a cloud managed "controller hub", it's a shame such nice hardware turns into ewaste so easily.
What do you need from the UARTl ? I'll see if I can mess with it later tonight or some day this week.
The most important information is if the access to bootloader is locked by password. If it's locked then does it have recovery option? On WR-1 (https://git.openwrt.org/80baffd2aa91) there's recovery option using USB stick. Here we have no USB port but on WR-1, when recovery was triggered, also ethernet ports were probed and TFTP was checked for an image. I would assume here's similar situation. So question what happens when reset/recovery button is pressed and power applied? UART output should tell what's happening.
Regarding other devices, OpenWrt provides generic-initramfs-kernel.bin images for octeon. Try to download one (You may also try out images for older releases), setup TFTP server. The flow of commands is something like this:
dhcp
tftpboot $(loadaddr) <openwrt_image>
bootoctlinux $(loadaddr)
If Your environment does not provide DHCP server, setting static ip in environment will be necessary (I don't remember the name of variable).
1 Like