VeloCloud 520 (5×0) to Opensource (WIP)

I was lucky enough to find and purchase a Velocloud 520 for $5AUD at a swap meet. After some research here and removing the case, I was able to work out enough of the systems specifications to get Ubuntu to boot reliably.

Firstly I removed the press out plastic cover for the onboard USB serial port. This helped working out the bootup sequence. From there I tried installing any Linux distro that output to a serial console, but they all failed and rebooted after a few minutes. After a while I worked out it was approximately, if not exactly the same length of time.

Thanks to bubbadestroy for this idea, I purchased a mPCI-E to PCI-E adapter so I could get video output using a low end NVidia graphics card. This allowed confirmation on the rebooting time line, and also shown that it supports PXE booting by default.

The rebooting of the device was due to a hardware watchdog or at least a watchdog embedded into the BIOS, that reboots the system after 3 minutes. To get around this, I pre-installed Ubuntu onto a USB and added the following to the rc.local:

• modprobe i2c-i801
• modprobe i2c-smbus
• modprobe iTCO-wdt
• and “nmi_watchdog=0” was added as a boot switch.

The distro booted up fine and the watchdog no longer presented a problem. Unfortunately none of the NICs on the rear would initialize, so the wireless was used in client mode to get network access. After some more research I was able to get the SFP’s to initialize with a 1GB copper SFP.

Hoping to get full usage from all the NIC’s, I looked through the source code released here. That’s where the rabbit warren of failed/missing packages and disappointment started. After a few weeks I went back to trying to merge the changes in the OpenWRT with PFSense (FreeBSD) source. After a few more weeks of even more disappointment I went back to just getting the OpenWRT source patched as a proof of concept which could then be built on.

Finally after another few weeks, I had OpenWRT working, that (as far as I could tell) provided basic network switching capabilities. The USB installer image can be found here. As a nasty “install” I did a “dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb” There is an install file in /root/installer -p (after removing all partitions and setting a blank GPT) to copy the data from the USB to the internal 8GB storage.

I added a partition for the Qemu files and mounted it:

One of the packages that was built was Qemu, I plan to the use that to mount and run a PFSense install using the ample amount of available RAM/CPU, hopefully with minimum fuss* Given previous results much fuss is expected.

Update – 17/11/21

So far PFSense appears to be running OK, for some reason there was a few ROM files for Qemu that didn’t get included in the final OpenWRT image although they were compiled. I’m having issues with networking, but they are most likely due to my unfamiliarity with Qemu’s setup and should fixable.

I’ve had OPNSense recommended as an alternative so I gave that a go and it booted fine with a working bridged network interface. I created another bridge on the host for the WAN interface.

#Setup file
modprobe kvm_intel

qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -cpu host -smp 2 -m 2G \
   -drive file=/mnt/PFSense/pfsense.qcow2,if=virtio \
   -vnc :0 \
   -vga cirrus \
   -device virtio-net-pci,mac=E2:F2:6A:01:9D:C9,netdev=br0 \
     --netdev bridge,helper="/usr/bin/qemu-bridge-helper --use-vnet --br=br-lan --fd=3",id=br0 \
   -device virtio-net-pci,mac=E2:F2:6A:01:9D:AA,netdev=br1 \
     --netdev bridge,helper="/usr/bin/qemu-bridge-helper --use-vnet --br=br-wan --fd=3",id=br1

The bridges are setup on the OpenWRT host as follows.

UPDATE – 20-11-21

I recompiled the kernel to try to get PCI passthrough working with Qemu.
Added to kernel boot command “intel_iommu=on vfio-pci.ids=168c:003c” <– this is the wifi ID
Boot output:
dmesg – [ 0.000000] Intel-IOMMU: enabled
lspci – 00:0f.0 IOMMU: Intel Corporation Atom processor C2000 RCEC (rev 03)

Created /etc/modules.d/vfio and /etc/modules-boot.d/74-vfio:
“options vfio-pci ids=168c:003c enable_unsafe_noiommu_mode=1”
– No luck so far.