Antoine Beaupr : Proprietary VDSL2 Linux routers adventures
I recently bought a wireless / phone adapter / VDSL modem from my
Internet Service Provider (ISP) during my last
outage. It generally works fine as a
VDSL modem, but unfortunately, I can't seem to get used to configuring
the device through their clickety web user interface... Furthermore, I
am worried that I can't backup the config in a meaningful way, that
is: if the device fails, I will probably not find the same model again
and because they run a custom Linux distributions, the chances of the
backup being possible to restore on another machine are basically
zero. No way i will waste my time configuring this black box. So I
started looking at running a distribution like OpenWRT on
it.
(Unfortunately, I don't even dare hoping to run a decent operating system like Debian on those devices, if only because of the exotic chipsets that require all sorts of nasty hacks to run...)The machine is a SmartRG SR630n (specs). I am linking to third party site, because the SmartRG site doesn't seem to know about their own product (!). I paid extra for this device to get one that would do both Wifi and VoIP, so i could replace two machines: my current Soekris net5501 router and a Cisco ATA 186 phone adapter that seems to mysteriously defy the challenges of time. (I don't remember when I got that thing, but it's at least from 2006.) Unfortunately, it seems that SmartRG are running a custom, proprietary Linux distribution. According to my ISP,
init
is a complete rewrite
that reads an XML config file (and indeed it's the format of the
backup files) and does the configuration through a shared memory
scheme (!?). According to DSL reports, the device seems to be
running a Broadcom 63168 SOC (system on a chip) that is
unsupported in Linux. There are some efforts to write drivers for
those from scratch, but they have been basically stalled for years
now.
Here are more details on the sucker:
- walkthrough - i can easily get telnet access and a busybox shell
- ls -lR - all files listing
- adsl information - all sorts of cryptic information about the DSL line
- dumpsysinfo output - some custom information dump tool, includes dmesg, kernel modules listing and so on
- xml config dump - some passwords were obviously censored...
- image dump -
extracted straight from
/dev/mtdblock0
withnc
- extracted image dump - used a patched version of squashfs-tools to support special LZMA magic markers
- interesting binary blobs - a select few files that seem to hold firmware images or interesting proprietary blobs
See this other good explanation of Stinger.Which means this machine is now yet another closed box sitting on the internet without firmware upgrades, totally handicapped. I will probably end up selling it back for another machine that has OpenWRT support for their VDSL modems. But there are very few such machines, and with a lot of those, VDSL support is often marked as "spotty" or "in progress". Some machines are supported but are basically impossible to find. There's the Draytek modems are also interesting because, apparently, some models run OpenWRT out of the box too, which is a huge benefit. This is because they use the more open Lantiq SOC. Which are probably not going to support Stinger lines. Still, there are some very interesting projects out there... The Omnia is one I am definitely interested in right now. I really like their approach... But then they don't have a VDSL chipset in there (I asked for one, actually). And the connectors are only mini-PCIe, which makes it impossible to connect a VDSL PCI card into it. I could find a single VDSL2 PCI card online, and it could be supported, but only the annex B is available, not the annex A, and it seems the network is using "annex A" according to the ADSL stats i had in 2015-05-28-anarcat-back-again. With such a card, I could use my existing Soekris net5501 router, slam a DSL card into it, and just use the SmartRG as a dumb wifi router/phone adapter. Then it will remain to see how supported are those VDSL cards in FreeBSD (they provide Linux source code, so that's cool). And of course, all this assumes the card works with the "Stinger" mode, which is probably not the case anyways. Besides, I have VDSL2 here, not the lowly ADSL2+. By the way, Soekris keeps on pushing new interesting products out: their net6501, with 2 extra Gig-E cards could be a really interesting high-end switch, all working with free software tools. A friend has a SmartRG 505n modem, which looks quite similar, except without the ATA connectors. And those modems are the ones that Teksavvy recommends ("You may use a Cellpipe 7130 or Sagemcom F@ST 2864 in lieu of our SmartRG SR505N for our DSL 15/10, DSL 25 or DSL 50 services."). Furthermore, Teksavvy provides a firmware update for the 505n - again, no idea if it works with the 630n. Of course, the 505n doesn't run OpenWRT either. So, long story short, again I got screwed by my ISP: I thought i would get a pretty hackable device, "running Linux" that my ISP said over the phone. I got weeks of downtime, no refund, and while i got a better line (more reliable, higher bandwidth), my costs doubled. And I have yet another computing device to worry about: instead of simplifying and reducing waste, I actually just added crap on top of my already cluttered desk. Next time, maybe I'll tell you about how my ISP overbilled me, broke IPv6 and drops large packets to the floor. I haven't had a response from them in months now... hopefully they will either answer and fix all of this (doubtful) or I'll switch to some other provider, probably Teksavvy. Many thanks to the numerous people in the DSL reports Teksavvy forum that have amazing expertise. They are even building a map of Bell COs... Thanks also to Taggart for helping me figure out how the firmware images work and encouraging me to figure out how my machine works overall.
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