First, a bit of confusion in branding. Silver Peak (now part of Aruba) has two devices branded Unity Edgeconnect EC-XS. One of them is a rebranded Lanner FW-7551 (which I covered in a previous thread that took two years to complete). The other is a rebranded Advantech FWA-1012, and this is the device I recently spent some time with.
(Image courtesy of Serve The Home forums. If you are interested in this device, I highly recommend this post; it has a lot of useful information, including photos of the device’s internals.)
Now, a word of caution: power supply. For some reason, Advantech decided not to use a ubiquitous barrel, such as 5.5 x 2.5 or 5.5 x 2.1 mm, but instead, went with a far less common 5.0 x 2.0. So if you’re thinking of buying this device, be sure you have a power supply for it. Finding one in the wild is not impossible, but will require some effort and some extra (compared to the 5.5 mm power supplies) cash.
Out of the box, the device appears to be protected against alternative operating systems; the whole unholy trifecta (factory BIOS password, watchdog, and bypasses) is in place. Luckily, the BIOS password has been extracted (see link to Serve The Home forums above); it is Kilimanjaro1 (Africa’s tallest mountain with number one tacked onto the end). You connect via console at 9600 bps, turn the device on, and start mashing the Del key on your keyboard. Eventually, you will be presented with a password entry screen. Once you gain access to BIOS, you should be able to disarm the watchdog and turn off the bypasses (it’s all on the Platform page). Speaking of BIOS, expect to spend some time in it. The Post & Boot page in BIOS contains the Boot Option Priorities section. Alas, only one option is shown, so you will need to scroll further down into Hard Drive BBS Priorities section and select the boot device from there. Once selected, the device becomes the only boot option visible both in the Boot Option Priorities section and on the Save & Exit page under override options.
The device is running on an Intel Atom C3558 processor (quad-core, 2.2 GHz) with 16 GB RAM. There are two storage devices, an 8 GB eMMC module and a 128 GB m.2 drive. According to the above-cited post on the Serve The Home forum, the m.2 drive can be SATA or NVMe. I was able to handle the Wintec drive that came with the device as if it were SATA (the drive’s label was completely mum on the subject). There’s also a SATA connector on the motherboard, but I was not able to locate a power connector for a SATA drive, which made me wonder whether the SATA connector was intended for a SATA-DOM drive.
Networking (wired only) consists of six independently configurable ports, two Intel i210 and four Intel x553. The device is actively cooled, with two 40-mm fans pushing air side-to-side. The fans start off at a level I would describe as “clearly audible”, but calm down to “barely audible” as the boot process completes.
OpenWrt installation was relatively easy. I decided to install it onto the eMMC drive, so I began by removing the m.2 drive, just so it doesn’t get in the way. Next, with the device still turned off, I plugged in a USB stick with OpenWrt written onto it. Then, I turned the device on, went into BIOS and changed console speed to 115200 bps (Platform >> Serial Console >> Serial Console Speed >> 115200) and made the USB stick the boot drive (see above). Once I saved settings and exited BIOS, OpenWrt booted from the USB stick. By default, port labeled mgmt0 became LAN, and port labeled mgmt1, WAN.
I connected the device to the upstream network, poked around a bit (I needed the system name of the eMMC device, which, somewhat predictably, turned out to be mmcblk0), and then did the actual installation:
cd /tmp
wget -O fw.img.gz https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/24.10.5/targets/x86/64/openwrt-24.10.5-x86-64-generic-squashfs-combined.img.gz
zcat fw.img.gz > /dev/mmcblk0
For the benefit of new users:
- The first command changes to a temporary directory (which actually resides in memory, rather than on any storage device, so access to it is very fast)
- The second command downloads OpenWrt image (release 24.10.5, squashfs, legacy) and names the downloaded file
fw.img.gz - The third command does the actual installation; it expands the downloaded image onto the internal eMMC storage device
After the installation process completed, I turned the device off (poweroff), removed the USB stick, and turned the device back on. OpenWrt booted with zero issues, and I was able to proceed to further configuration.
Overall, I liked the device, but the choice of power connector has me scratching my head…