I got an old Cisco AP and I looked inside!
I got an old Cisco AP and I looked inside!
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16959253
I got this AP for free, and had some fun trying to configure it, and I decided to look at the inside of this thing. It has a PowerPC processor, pretty cool!
It is a Cisco Aironet 1131AG
More pics:
It's an old AP from around 2007, I managed to get the latest firmware thanks to some guy on the Internet Archive (thank god they exists) ! ( https://archive.org/download/cIOS-firmware-images/ )
By the way, with some not so ancient devices you can search for the firmware here: https://software.cisco.com/download/home and at least get MD5 and SHA-512 hashes to verify the files you downloaded.
Not the case with this AP though.
Edit: Oh, I almost forgot. Also the exact filename. Makes it easy finding it online.
Of course and I tried to search it, didn't find the download on the Cisco website sadly, nor the md5sum for this specific file, I found some other sums tho.
Cisco has a tendancy to remove download or block them behing an account with a licence...
If you surprised why it has a PowerPC CPU. It's actually a SoC.
From the manual:AMCC PowerPC 405 32-bit RISC processor core operating up to 333MHz with 16KB D-and I-caches.
Designed specifically to address embedded applications, the PowerPC 405EP (PPC405EP), provides a high-performance, low-power solution that interfaces to a wide range of peripherals by incorporating on-chip power management features and lower power dissipation requirements.
Sweet! My first computer was a 333mhz PowerPC Mac! Still have that behemoth. Man, I learned video editing and 3d modelind on that thing and totally changed my career path.
Now 25 years later it's decendant (roughly?) is a SoC running a wireless hub!
hard to say for sure, but U109 and U208 could be UART into those Cisco baseband or radio chips. one placement for the 2.4 GHz (G) and 5 GHz (A), respectively. would be interesting to probe around there and see if you get a serial interface to it... obviously for extra credit ;-)
Ooo, that'd be fun, and scary, I never done such a thing, maybe I could look at this some day !
Why something that old? WiFi standards move on and so does security.
However, if it isn't Broadcom you probably can get OpenWRT running
Why not, old hardware can ne really cool you know! It's not for running 24/7 of course, just to sée what once was a cool and expensive product
Not for WiFi. You can get a cheap WiFi 5 device that will work way better. Just flash Openwrt to a supported device and you are golden.