Shadowing Practice: I might have found the BEST budget router... - Learn English Speaking with Video
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I picked up these two proprietary systems off of eBay for pennies on the dollar, and after just a little bit of tinkering, I was able to convert them into extremely useful and efficient little DIY routers.
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At least, that's what I was hoping to say when I first started this project.
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Now don't get me wrong, I was able to modify both of these so that they can be repurposed, and in some ways they work really well, especially considering just how much I paid for them.
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But it didn't take just a little bit of tinkering, it took so much tinkering that I was about ready to pull an office space on one of these two specifically.
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But I didn't do that, and after many hours of reading through forum posts and failing and trying again, I finally managed to mostly get these little guys working.
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So let me show you how I did that, and what these interesting little systems might be capable of.
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So what are these two systems?
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Well, let's start with this one first, which is a Dell EMC Edge 510 LTE.
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These devices are used for SD-WAN applications, specifically with VMware's VeloCloud service, and I don't really care all that much about any of that.
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Essentially, these boxes would be deployed on the edge of a company's network, places like office branches or retail locations, and rather than being configured locally,
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they would all be managed from a central service.
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These boxes would then handle routing, firewall policies, VPN tunnels, WAN failover, all that stuff to create a wide area network between all of the different branches.
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So a software defined WAN or SD-WAN.
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Now I need to give a quick shout out to Micola, hopefully I'm saying that right, for sending me an email about these.
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And after looking into it, I was able to very easily buy one of these for just $17 or so on eBay.
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And it even came new in the box.
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Well, it seems to be new.
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There is a dent right here on the back panel, but there's no other scratches.
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So I'm assuming this was actually like new old stock.
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In that email, he also shared a link to this thread on the serve the home forum, which covers a few other similar devices like this Edge 610.
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Unfortunately though, this is not what I meant to buy.
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I was really meaning to buy an Edge 620 for some reasons that I'll get to here in a bit.
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I did go ahead and purchase a 620 after I noticed my mistake, but that still hasn't shipped and it's been well over a week now so who knows if I'll ever get that.
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But today we're going to still at least talk about these two units.
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Now obviously both of these devices come with a handful of Ethernet ports.
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The 510 has four RJ45 gigabit ports and the 610 has six RJ45 gigabit ports as well as two SFP1 giga ports.
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Now the 620
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that I was hoping to buy as well as some of
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the other higher-end models actually come with 10 gig SFP plus ports.
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Now these systems also come with some Intel Atom processors,
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which would lead one to believe that these should be able to be repurposed with non-proprietary software like OpenSense or OpenWRT.
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And it seems like much smarter people than I have figured out ways of doing just that.
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But before trying to hack into these things, let's talk a bit more about the specs.
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The Edge 510 obviously features those 4 gigabit NICs on the back, but it also has a barrel jack for power, a reset button, and then under a little cover,
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this mini USB port for a serial connection as well as a SIM card slot.
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You also get two USB 2 ports, one on either side, and that's really about it for the outside.
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If you remove four screws on the bottom, you can easily pop off the lid, and here you don't really find much, just a mini PCIe slot for the Wi-Fi card,
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as well as an M.2B key slot for a cell modem.
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One of the features of these models, as the LTE in the name might suggest, is that these could be used with a cellular connection, so if your ISP went down for some reason,
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it could fail over to a backup cellular connection, which I also forgot to mention that there are these antenna connectors on the back for some cellular antennas.
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Back on the inside, hidden away somewhere, there's a 16GB EMMC flash chip for storage,
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as well as 4GB of DDR3L memory and the Intel Atom C20358 processor.
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This dual core from back in 2013 probably isn't all that much to write home about, But with a TDP of just 7 watts,
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it might be pretty efficient while having just enough horsepower to scrape by.
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The 610 has a bit more going for it in terms of specs, we already talked about those network ports on the back, and like the 510 it has a barrel jack for power,
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a reset button, and another cover that exposes a mini USB port for serial.
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Oh, and this also has two USB ports, one on either side, but these are USB 3 ports.
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Once again, four screws are all you need to take out to pop open the cover, and here while While there is a bit more going on, it's pretty similar to the 510.
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There's a mini PCIe slot for WiFi, an empty B-key slot for a non-existent modem, and that's about it.
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Oh, and I should note that on both of these systems, the M.2 B-key slot doesn't support SATA or PCIe,
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they only support USB, which seems to be the case for most of these cell modem slots I've come across.
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The 610 also includes 16GB of EMMC flash storage and 4GB of RAM, but this uses a newer Intel Atom, the C3308.
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This is still a dual core, but it was released in 2017, supports DDR4, and is, uh, well, it's just pretty much all around slightly better and newer.
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Now, like I said, I don't have a 620, but the higher-end models of these, like the 620 and 640 and 680, come with dual 10 gig NICs, but they also have better CPUs,
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more expansion options, more RAM, so maybe I'll have to do a video diving into those.
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For now, though, I just had my two models, which both just had some nonsense VeloCloud stuff installed on them, and I wanted to run something better.
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Now theoretically these systems are just simple x86 systems and normally
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that would mean you can just install a new operating system on them and boom you're done.
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But if you hadn't noticed I mentioned the word Dell which means this is going to be a huge hassle.
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Now you know what isn't going to be a huge hassle?
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Keeping all of your devices charged thanks to an awesome power bank like this one from today's sponsor Ugreen.
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This thing includes one of my favorite features of Ugreen's products, which is this 65cm retractable cable.
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This makes it so easy to just toss this into my bag
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and not even worry about whether or not I packed a USB-C cable.
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And with a rating of over 1000 plug and 25,000 retract cycles, this thing will be charging your gear for quite a long time.
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And there's actually another built-in cable that's, well, it's sort of hidden because it actually doubles as this little carry handle.
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And then see, you can just pop it out and it's another little cable.
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How cool.
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Along with that, you also get a Type-C and Type-A port.
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So in total, you can charge four devices all at once.
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As the name suggests, it can support up to 200 watts of total power across all ports, and 100 watts on just a single port,
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which is powerful enough to charge a 15-inch M5 MacBook Air to almost 50% in just half an hour.
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And with this 25,000 milliamp hour battery, it can charge something like an iPhone 17 Pro Max over three times.
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You also get a great looking display that can show metrics like total output power, individual port stats, and more.
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There's also other great devices like this Nexo Pro 160-watt charger.
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This also comes with a handy display, as well as four USB-C ports and a Type-A port, making it perfect for sort of your main charging station, either at home or at the office or wherever.
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With its powerful gallium nitride technology, it can provide up to 140 watts on either of the first two USB-C ports.
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And with built-in power management, it also automatically distributes current to help prevent any overheating or overcharging.
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If you're interested, you can get up to 40% off of these
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Just click my links down in the description.
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All right, back to hacking these little guys.
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One of the first problems you'll come across is that, well, neither one of these have any sort of video output.
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That's not a huge issue normally, I've actually tackled quite a few different headless systems in the past, either by adding on a GPU via some sort of adapter,
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or by using a serial connection.
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And both of these options are available with these two systems.
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While I did get a GPU working via a very sketchy series of adapters, I primarily decided to use the serial port, which just requires a simple mini-USB cable.
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I started with the 510 because I felt a little more confident I could get that working, thanks to this incredible guide on GitHub from Jacob Witt.
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Here, he consolidated info from a bunch of other awesome people on the NetGate forums and created a guide for installing OpenSense.
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I skipped over the GPU bit, just using a serial connection, and then I followed the rest of the instructions.
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I signed into the pre-installed VeloCloud OS by using the password Velohello plus the last three digits of the Dell service tag.
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From there, you just download a modified firmware image, flash it to the BIOS chip, and then use an I2C command to disable the watchdog timer.
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Oh, which I haven't mentioned the watchdog timer yet, but that's one of the biggest issues with these systems.
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By default, if the system isn't booted into the correct OS where the watchdog gets disabled, the system will just hard reset after a few minutes.
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So if you do manage to get into a different installer or a different OS, the system will work for a bit, but then it will just continue power cycling on you unless you figure out a way to disable it.
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But after following these instructions, that problem was solved.
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Now with this guide, he installs OpenSense, but I also wanted to try out OpenWrt and also just plain Debian 13 for some testing.
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But whenever I tried booting into those, I just got a blank console.
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I'll come back to that later though.
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The important thing was that this 510 was now cracked and I wanted to move on to the 610.
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Now this is where things start to get pretty messy.
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There isn't a clear conclusive guide on this or the other 600 series models.
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I might be getting some of this stuff wrong because it's pretty messy but just bear with me.
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Like I mentioned before there's a thread on the serve the
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home forum where a bunch of incredible people have poured hours into trying to reverse engineer these things
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and I believe through a combination of different BIOS versions and using I2C commands, people have figured out how to crack the 620
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and the higher-end models and be able to use them as standard x86 systems pretty well.
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But once again, I accidentally ordered the 610, which, well, most people just say to absolutely avoid.
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And that's not just because getting a hold of a BIOS version is pretty much impossible
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or because it has the 1GB SFP ports instead of 10GB, but it's actually for some even more horrible reasons that we'll get into here very shortly.
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Now I still wanted to see if I could get this working though so I connected up my serial cable, booted it up, and I was actually able to get into the BIOS menu fairly easily.
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While looking around though the watchdog timer kicked in and the system rebooted.
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There's no setting in the BIOS menu to disable this either so I decided to start digging a bit further.
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The built-in VeloCloud software on this model was pretty much useless
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and booting into anything else didn't keep the watchdog timer from resetting.
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but a lot of people mentioned booting into Dell's Diag OS.
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I think some people had devices that already had this pre-installed on a different partition or something.
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Mine didn't, and I was eventually able to hunt down a download link for it.
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So I flashed that to a USB, booted into it, and miraculously, the system didn't reset.
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Now I'm not sure if I just got lucky
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and had the right BIOS version or the right version of Diag OS to have this working so easily, but whenever I booted into that Diag OS,
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It not only kept the watchdog timer from resetting then, but it actually seemed to permanently fix it because after that,
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I could hang around in the BIOS or boot into a different operating system and not have the system reset.
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What actually fixed the problem was some initialization that was happening in DiagOS at slash at C slash rc.local, which right off the bat,
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you can see this run some I2C commands that disable the watchdog timer.
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This info is really helpful because if for some reason the PIC chip, which is what controls the watchdog timer, If that ever gets reset, you could just save these commands
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and run them from whichever operating system you're wanting to use to make sure it always stays disabled.
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So with that solved, it seemed like I pretty much had both the 510
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and the 610 in a state where I could install whatever operating system I wanted and just hit the ground running.
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At least that's what I was hoping was the case.
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We'll come back to this 510 here in a bit.
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We're going to focus on the 610 for just a second.
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I did install OpenSense to the internal flash with no issues.
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but when I went to actually try to configure the interfaces,
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only four showed up, which obviously doesn't really line up with our six plus two pattern of network ports we have here.
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To just get into the web UI, I used a USB to Ethernet adapter, and there, in the OpenSense UI, I saw the exact same thing,
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and I couldn't find a way to get any of these working.
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So I plugged in a Debian 13 live USB that I modified to work via serial, that way I could just hop in and tinker around a bit.
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Side note, if having a little Debian live image that works out of the box via serial sounds interesting, I'll have a repo to my configs for how I got that set up,
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so you can make one for yourself if you're interested.
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In Debian, I once again saw those four interfaces, and also once again couldn't get any of them working.
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Now, based on my research into this, I sort of already expected something like this, because, uh, well, those six RJ45 ports aren't typical network interfaces.
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They're really just ports that are connected to an embedded Marvell switch chip.
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So essentially, this is just a network switch that's connected to the rest of the system.
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I actually came across something pretty similar to this when I looked at this Raspberry NVR just a little while back.
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But here, these ports are supposed to act differently.
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They're not supposed to act like a simple network switch.
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I'm not exactly sure why Dell went with this setup.
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I'm assuming it was cheaper
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and possibly more efficient to have some of the networking offloaded to a dedicated chip rather than everything going through the CPU, I don't really know.
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Once again, I'm probably going to get some of this wrong or oversimplify a bit.
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But essentially how I believe this is all connected is
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that there are these six ports that are connected to the switch chip, and then there are two internal interfaces between the CPU and that same switch chip,
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which would be two of the interfaces we saw earlier.
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To be able to sort of see all of these interfaces independently, the switch configures all six of these ports to be on separate VLANs, and then those get passed to the OS via two trunk ports,
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which are those two interfaces I just mentioned.
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Whenever you boot into Diag OS, you can actually see these interfaces labeled as, for example, ETH 0.1 at ETH 0, up through ETH 1.6 at ETH 1.
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For all of that to work properly, the internal switch needs to set up and configure all of those VLANs,
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and then the operating system needs to create all of the correct interfaces and link it all up properly.
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Now, the two SFP ports are a bit simpler.
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it seems like those were just essentially tied directly to an individual interface.
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In DiagOS, for example, it was ETH3 and ETH4, but by default, they're actually disabled.
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Back in that slash at C slash rc.local I mentioned earlier, you can find pretty much all of this.
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After the watchdog stuff at the top, there's some init commands that go to the Marvell 88E6190 switch chip using this VP1400MDIO tool.
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And then later on it runs a separate script
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that configures all of those weird VLANs to make all of the routing work.
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For the SFP ports, there's just a simple pair of I2C commands that turn off TX disable.
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I don't know why that needs to be disabled by default, but it is.
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And fortunately, since that's just a simple I2C command, that's an easy fix that can not only be repeated with other operating systems, but that setting also persists between worm reboots.
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So if you boot into DiagOS, it'll fix those ports, and then if you boot into something else without doing a hard reset, those ports will still continue to work.
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Configuring the other ports, though, was obviously not as simple.
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I'll be honest, most of this stuff is pretty far over my head.
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I tried to use all of the information that was available on that forum thread, as well as using an LLM for a little bit of help as well.
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And while I actually managed to at least copy over some of the programs
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and info from the DiagOS install into a different Debian install, and I even had a script that seemed to get the switch up and running.
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However, I could just not get any of the actual interfaces linked up in the operating system.
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I don't think I saw anywhere else where someone got this working in Linux, but I did see this post here where someone was able to get this working in PFSense+.
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However, that seemed to require modules that only exist in PFSense+, which is the paid version of PFSense, and those weren't included in OpenSense, at least as far as I'm aware.
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And I wasn't about to start trying to recompile the FreeBSD kernel or anything.
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I'm sure solving this is possible by someone smarter than me or if I just put in a lot more time, but for now that's where I gave up.
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I at least had two working interfaces on this, so I was able to boot back into OpenSense and use interfaces 3 and 4.
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Using a couple of SFP to RJ45 transceivers, I was able to set this up as a basic little firewall
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and when testing with with an upstream open speed test server, I was getting pretty much full gigabit speeds.
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All right, now moving back to the 5.10 for a bit.
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In OpenSense, I didn't have any issues configuring the interfaces, they all just showed up and worked,
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but it did seem like this older system struggled a little bit to maintain gigabit read speeds.
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I also wanted to try setting up OpenWrt to see
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if I could get this set up as not only a firewall slash router, but also as a wireless access point.
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To do so, I started booting into my Debian Live image, but I remembered that I had ran into that weird quirk earlier where I was just met with a blank screen.
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On a whim, I decided to try changing the arguments in Grub to use TTYS1 instead of S0, and that actually did the trick.
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It's a bit annoying because everything up through the bootloader works on TTYS0, but it seems like whenever this actually boots into an operating system,
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it switches over to TTYS1.
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Anyway, I had it figured out
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and was able to use the Debian Live image to then download
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and flash OpenWrt to the built-in flash storage without any major issues.
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Well, other than that, once again, I couldn't get OpenWrt booted into a console because the whole TTY is one thing.
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I was able to solve this by going back into my Debian Live ISO and modifying the grub parameters again,
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which worked, but then I realized I didn't need to get into a serial console.
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I could just plug a network cable in and use the web UI.
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I'm an idiot.
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At that point, I was able to straighten out which port was assigned to what, and I re-ran my speed tests, and here I found that, well, it managed gigabit just fine.
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I'm not sure if that's an OpenWRT versus OpenSense thing or Linux versus FreeBSD or what, but I wasn't complaining.
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Now, OpenWRT is a bit more complicated to get set up.
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For example, it pretty much doesn't come with any packages pre-included, so I had to find and install the right packages for my WiFi adapter to work.
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but once I did, I was able to set up an SSID and connect to it with my phone, and the speeds here weren't incredible or anything, but I was testing from all the way across the house,
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and I'm sure things could improve with a bit of tweaking.
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Clearly, between these two systems, the 510 is a better value for a repurposed DIY router.
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It's substantially cheaper.
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It's good enough for simple gigabit.
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It has four working ports rather than two, and it doesn't require any extra transceivers or SFP equipment,
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and it has a built-in cell modem and antennas if that's something you're interested in.
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But I was still curious about this 610 because it does have that more modern CPU or relatively more modern CPU
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and so I thought maybe this still could be useful in some non-router use cases.
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To test that out, I installed Debian, but for realsies this time, onto an actual SSD using the mini PCA slot and some adapters.
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I also tried installing Debian onto an SSD with the 510 as well, but that system doesn't support booting from NVMe using that mini PCIe slot,
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so you would either have to configure a separate USB drive to function as a bootloader, or just do what I did and use a USB adapter.
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Once I had an actual install of Debian, I ran Geekbench 6 to get a rough idea of how these two systems performed in comparison to some others.
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Starting with the 610, the result was not great.
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It managed single and multi-core scores of 223 and 411 respectively, which is worse than a Raspberry Pi 4B.
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Now, PowerDraw here was okay.
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At idle, it sat right around 10 watts, and it only really jumped up to like 11, almost 12 watts when actually running workloads.
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I did notice that in the UEFI menu, Turbo was disabled, so I re-ran the test after enabling that.
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The PowerDraw didn't really look any different, so I wasn't expecting a change, but that change actually gave a 27 to 28% bump in performance,
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which was still worse than a Pi 4.
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But hey, it wasn't nearly as bad as the C2358 in the Edge 510.
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That system only managed scores of 147 and 265.
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While you could absolutely run some lightweight server workloads like Home Assistant or something on this 610,
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by the time you bought one of these and then got some SFP transceivers to be able to network it probably, and then did all the hacky stuff to actually get it working,
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you would already be way better off by just buying an older Raspberry Pi.
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But for now, I can at least say that this Edge 510, especially for the $17 or $18 I paid for it, is a heck of a value
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if you're looking for a flexible little gigabit router for a backup
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or for traveling or for just a simple little router for your home lab.
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As long as you don't mind putting in a bit of elbow grease to get it working.
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As much as I wanted to pull what little hair I have out while working on these, I still had a lot of fun just tinkering around and I hope you guys had as much fun watching this video.
237
If so, maybe consider leaving a like or subscribing.
238
That actually goes a long way.
239
Also, you might consider becoming a raid member.
240
For as little as a dollar a month, you can get early access to ad-free versions of all of
241
my videos as well as some other perks depending on the tier.
242
That's about it for this one though.
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So as always, thank you guys so much for watching, stay curious, and I can't wait to see you in the next one.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This B2 speaking lesson is built on the video “I might have found the BEST budget router..”. This video has 243 sentences and 4416 words to shadow. The speech runs for 22:17. The speaker talks fast, about 198 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. Only 77% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.
Key vocabulary in this video
The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| boot noun | /but/ | A heavy shoe that covers part of the leg. |
| interface noun | /ˈɪn(t)ɚˌfeɪs/ | The point of interconnection or contact between entities. |
| disable verb | /dɪsˈeɪbəl/ | To render unable; to take away an ability of, as by crippling. |
| watchdog noun | /ˈwɑːt͡ʃˌdɑːɡ/ | A guard dog. |
| reset verb | /ɹiːˈsɛt/ | To set back to the initial state. |
| slot noun | /slɑt/ | A narrow depression, perforation, or aperture; especially, one for the reception of a piece fitting or sliding into it. |
| install verb | /ɪnˈstɔl/ | To connect, set up or prepare something for use |
| configure verb | /kənˈfɪɡə(ɹ)/ | To set up or arrange something in such a way that it is ready for operation for a particular purpose, or to someone's particular liking |
| gigabit noun | /ˈɡɪɡəbɪt/ | One billion (10⁹, or 1,000,000,000) bits or 1,000 megabits. |
| timer noun | /ˈtaɪmɚ/ | A device used to measure amounts of time. |
| watt noun | /wɑt/ | In the International System of Units, the derived unit of power; the power of a system in which one joule of energy is transferred per second. |
| adapter noun | /əˈdæptəɹ/ | One who is capable of adapting to differing situations. |
| router noun | /ˈɹaʊ.tɚ/ | Someone who routes or directs items from one location to another. |
| modem noun | /ˈmoʊdəm/ | A device that encodes digital computer signals into analog telephone signals and vice versa, allowing computers to communicate over a phone line. |
| firewall noun | /ˈfaɪ(ə)ɹˌwɔl/ | A fireproof barrier used to prevent the spread of fire between or through buildings, structures, electrical substation transformers, or within an aircraft or… |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| set up verb | /ˌsɛt ˈʌp/ | To make ready for use. |
| figure out verb | To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce. | |
| come across verb | To change sides; to cross over to work for the opposition. | |
| get up to verb | To do something, especially something that is forbidden or improper. | |
| show up verb | To appear, arrive, or attend, especially suddenly or erratically. | |
| check out verb | To record the departure or withdrawal of someone or something (such as guests, employees, books, etc.). | |
| come up verb | To emerge or become known, especially unexpectedly. | |
| give up verb | To surrender (someone or something); to inform on (someone). |
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | can be repurposed · would be deployed · be managed |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | hasn't shipped · have figured · I've come |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | first, which is · Dell which means · products, which is |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 73 contractions and reduced forms, such as I'm, didn't, don't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: instruction /ɪnˈstɹʌkʃən/, partition /pɑɹˈtɪ.ʃən/, shout /ʃaʊt/
- Long words — get the stress right: proprietary /pɹəˈpɹaɪ.ə.tə.ɹi/, consolidate /kənˈsɒl.ɪ.deɪt/, parameter /pəˈɹæm.ə.tɚ/, accessory /əkˈsɛs.(ə.)ɹi/, fortunately /ˈfɔɹ.t͡ʃə.nɪt.li/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like boot, interface, disable.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.