How would I go about installing LEDE on an Aruba AP-105? It's running an Atheros AR7161-BC1A. The card that has the antennas on it has dual AR9220-AC1A chips. Let me know if you need any more info about the board or whatever else you may need.
Thanks, Jack.
In the sense of "installing", you don't -at all- as the device itself isn't supported, you'll have to port OpenWrt to it first (which might not be too difficult (but it could just as well be very difficult, if the vendor tried to prevent 3rd party hacking), given that the SOC and wlan itself is supported, but you'll still have to work on the source level, write a mach file (and/ or DTS) add image code and reverse engineer the the partitioning and firmware format).
Are there any tutorials on how I can port it over to this AP? I also know that there are versions of OpenWRT that have been released for similar Aruba AP's using this same chipset, don't know if that makes things easier or not?
No, there are no step-by-step guides for that, if it were that simple, there wouldn't be human programmers anymore and machines could take over. Obviously you can get a rough idea from checking the git history for additions of similar (same target/ SOC) devices, but in the end it's up to someone with the hardware (read, 'you') and some understanding of linux, bootloaders, C, POSIX sh and GNU make to do the work of actually porting it. The vendor's GPL tarball, so it exists in public, might also be helpful (but rarely good enough), just as well as serial console access.
did you managed to connect to it by serial port ? what bootloader does it have (and options in bootloader) ? what switch does it have ? flash/mem ?
things can be easy or hard..
As far as I can tell AR9220 is "only" draft-n (http://nice.kaze.com/AR9220.pdf) so I'd honestly consider getting something newer as such hardware tends to have interesting quirks and usually quite a bit lower performance compared to more recent 11n hardware.
I just have a POE cisco switch I'm powering them off of, and I use Putty serial to communicate with it. I can boot from a remote bin file hosted on an FTP server, and I also believe I can completely wipe the device free of an OS. I don't know what bootloader it's using though. For flash/mem info, you can look here: https://wikidevi.com/wiki/Aruba_Networks_AP-105
In terms of memory, it looks like they're rocking 2x EM6AB160TSA-5G chips, so 64 Mb of DDR memory. For cpu, it's running an AR7161-BC1A, and a MX25L12845EMI-10G Flash memory chip.
I came into over 100 of these for free. They'll still put out at least 300 Mbps, which is fine for home use. I'm just trying to pack some functionality into some cheap and still very usable hardware, and hopefully allow others to be able to do the same. These sell for about $5 on ebay, so if anyone is looking for some cheap POE AP's that they can run custom firmware on, this will be a good option for them.
how do you instruct the device to boot from ftp ? can it boot from flash ? what options do you have before booting ?
an output with serial boot maybe should help, or maybe if you provide an image of what are you booting so someone can look to see if there is something special about the image
it must have a switch also, or it doesn't ?
can you put images with the board ?
300mbit in theory, I'd be surprised if you can pull more than ~120mbit IRL but I get your point. Just beware that 11n draft hardware may act a bit odd.
I recently got a few of these, looks like the hardware would support OpenWRT with ease; however the stock bootloader does seem to do some sort of RSA verification on the firmware.
Good chance that for this device to be ported, u-boot will need to be replaced.
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FWIW, @chunkeey and I were able to get a custom U-Boot to work on this device, so expect to see official support sometime in the near future.
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The 9220 wasn't one of the very first ath9k chips. I think it is the first one with spectrum analyzer mode which was a second generation feature.
What is the flash size? Some of these systems would network boot off of their controller, so they had little flash.
Can someone who is owning such a device please complete the wikidevi page (CPU, Flash, RAM)?
Thanks!
Seems I can't edit the page (captcha is broke and I don't have an account), however I have started an OpenWRT device page with the hardware info at https://openwrt.org/toh/aruba/aruba_ap-105
PR for OpenWRT support is at https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/pull/2058
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