I would be more interested in a 10gb capable device, as now in my country many providers are offering fiber at 8Gbps.
btw it's not 383€ as i said above, but 470€ when you add taxes and shipping. that's less interesting now but for the price it's still better (because of the 2x SFP+) than any aliexpress mini-PC.
But the problem is : What OS is runing or can we make runing on this device ? Can it be fully managed or it has to be tied to an orchestrator (like veloclouds)?
I bought an Edge 610 for €125, but unfortunately it arrived DOA. However, for anything over €200 I don't think these devices are worth it, even if you can get any OS to run on them. The C3000 series is still a cheap Atom-based chip at heart, and now over 6 years old. I highly highly doubt it will be able to route anything near 10 Gbit.
You'll probably have more success at a much more reasonable price when looking for younger thin clients. For example, a Dell Wyse 5070 on eBay for €149. Buy an Intel X520 or Mellanox 10 Gbit SFP card, and you'll have a much more powerful device for ~€200. The J5005 is still an Atom-based core, but with a more recent microarchitecture and more performant (still no 10 Gbit routing performance though).
For the price of that Edge 620 you'll probably even be able to find an HP t740 with a Ryzen Embedded V1756B if you have some patience. That will blow any embedded device out of the water.
Dell EMC SD-WAN Edge 640 is a C3758 CPU It uses the same Motherboard as the VEP-1445.
However if you change the OS, it will boot loop. You must install the BIOS from the VEP-1445 onto the SD WAN if you want your own OS.
To Flash the BIOS you need to first flash the Dell Recovery OS from the VEP-1445 to the eMMC of the SD-WAN. Once booted to the recovery OS you can then flash BIOS.
@Goosens thank you for your comment ! I didn't think these atoms were so weak.
They are capable of 1 GBit/s for 'normal' use cases and a few ports, better than the venerable jaguar cores from AMD, but I wouldn't expect anything beyond that.
So, for those who are still interested about this router, just got an answer from the website selling the device.
To the question : can we install the OS we want in this device, the answer is he answered this :
I'd be careful with accepting such statements from a vendor of refurbished goods... They probably just assume any OS will work, without having tested it themselves. They might very well not be aware of watchdogs, etc. They just want to sell...
As we're seeing with the velocloud devices, there are predominantly two areas of potential problems:
watchdog (this is usually more easy to sort out)
custom circuitry connecting (managed onboard-) switch chipsets to a normal onboard network card, this is the part that usually needs real development and mainlining the resulting driver adaptions (which is not easy)
If you look at the Sophos SG/ XG, pcengines or gateprotect devices, it is entirely possible to design the hardware with individual (onboard) network cards adding up to ~4 1000BASE-T ports - the managed switch option is just cheaper and can allow (relatively) more ports, while also offloading some of the traffic from the SOC to the switch fabric. I have not looked into the Dell EMC SD-WAN Edge 6x0 in detail, but it's entirely possible that they've designed this generation this way - and that OpenWrt (Debian, Fedora/ RHEL, etc.) just work on this hardware - it would have saved them a lot of software development time, at the expense of higher production costs (but also gaining marketability in the RHEL (and friends) server market).
I got my hands in a 620. Has watchdog. Regular procedures doesn't work.. I was able to boot with a linux. Recognize all eth ports.. the only problem is the watchdog. reboot's in 5 minutes.. I don't think is enough time to flash the bios with the vep1445 bios. Any idea to disable watch dog? at least to be able to flash the new bios? unfortunately I wiped the mmc trying to install the diag os.. for some reason the diag os keep failing when I am trying to install.
Installing Grub and Updating Grub Cfg /dev/sda2 EDA-DIAG
boot-dir /tmp/tmp.2zTYQM and blk_dev is /dev/sda, diagos_dev is /dev/sda2
Installing for i386-pc platform.
grub-install: warning: this GPT partition label contains no BIOS Boot Partition; embedding won't be possible.
grub-install: warning: Embedding is not possible. GRUB can only be installed in this setup by using blocklists. However, blocklists are UNRELIABLE and their use is discouraged..
grub-install: error: will not proceed with blocklists.
ERROR: grub-install failed on: /dev/sda
Removing /tmp/tmp.P2CICc
Failure: Unable to install image: /diag-installer-x86_64-dellemc_vep1400_c3538-r0-3.43.3.81-26-2022-03-01.bin
This should be not reachable unless something wrong is there!!!!!```
The instruction on how to reflash it using DiagOS doesn't work for me, DiagOS fails to install onto the built in eMMC and SSD, I get the same error @dmsmartins had.
DiagOS installer have the watchdog auto reboot problem too, but it can be disabled once you end up at the prompt, by running i2cset -y 1 0x22 0 0 b.
The i2cset command doesn't however work in OpenWRT, I get a write failed
I recently laid my hands on one of these, the 680 more precisely.
Could you please share some more insight on how did you manage to disable the watchdog?
So far the further I've managed to go is to boot Finnix and install i2c-tools, but the detect doesn't find it.
root@finnix:~# i2cdetect -y 4
Error: Could not open file `/dev/i2c-4' or `/dev/i2c/4': No such file or directory
@frollic if you have an idea...
Installation of diagos seems to finish successfully.
However there is an error about efibootmgr at the bottom of the install script.
[VEP1400-X] Board ID : 0x0b
rootfs install ok
Mounted /dev/mmcblk0p1 on /tmp/tmp.dJ0Zdg
Installing grub for diag-os
done
Updating EFI NVRAM Boot variables...
EFI variables are not supported on this system.
ERROR: efibootmgr failed to create new boot variable on: /dev/mmcblk0
Then when I remove the diagos usb stick and let it boot from mmc, I get the UEFI interactive shell.
UEFI Interactive Shell v2.1
EDK II
UEFI v2.60 (American Megatrends, 0x0005000D)
Mapping table
FS0: Alias(s):HD0f65535a1:;BLK1:
PciRoot(0x0)/Pci(0x13,0x0)/Sata(0x5,0xFFFF,0x0)/HD(1,GPT,5AE47D62-4AAE-4174-BFC8-789694DBB7B5,0x800,0x40000)
FS1: Alias(s):HD1b:;BLK4:
PciRoot(0x0)/Pci(0x1C,0x0)/SD(0x0)/HD(1,GPT,5DB8E925-C020-4647-8E34-367FB5A0A5F4,0x800,0x40000)
BLK0: Alias(s):
PciRoot(0x0)/Pci(0x13,0x0)/Sata(0x5,0xFFFF,0x0)
BLK2: Alias(s):
PciRoot(0x0)/Pci(0x13,0x0)/Sata(0x5,0xFFFF,0x0)/HD(2,GPT,24133027-C4C6-4CFA-84C3-571D822F0AA4,0x40800,0x400000)
BLK3: Alias(s):
PciRoot(0x0)/Pci(0x1C,0x0)/SD(0x0)
BLK5: Alias(s):
PciRoot(0x0)/Pci(0x1C,0x0)/SD(0x0)/HD(2,GPT,2807AB72-C0D4-485D-AD2F-A4DA6D082272,0x40800,0x400000)
Press ESC in 3 seconds to skip startup.nsh or any other key to continue.
Shell>
I guess something was not written correctly and it cannot find how to boot.
