Aerohive AP330

Aerohive AP330

Warning: This device must be flashed via UART. Do not buy a stock AP330 unless you are comfortable with the install process below.

Files

WikiDevi Page

OpenWRT Snapshots

OpenWRT commit message

Flashing From The Stock Firmware

Aerohive routers come with a super locked down operating system on them. They're optimized for management via something called the Hive Manager, which is a cloud platform owned by Aerohive. This obviously won't do!

In order to flash OpenWrt, we will need to interrupt the boot-up process using a serial cable and a program called minicom. We will then load OpenWrt directly into RAM, and boot from memory. After booting a temporary copy of OpenWrt in this way, we can run a sysupgrade within OpenWrt to flash OpenWrt onto the hard-drive. This is not as hard as it sounds. Before proceeding, you will want to obtain a console cable, and download minicom.

Interrupt The Boot Process

1. Connect your laptop to the Aerohive with a console cable
2. launch `minicom` in a terminal
3. Connect the Aerohive to power, and quickly press any key to interrupt the boot process
4. You should see a prompt starting with

   =>

Use Tftpboot To Load OpenWrt Into Memory

There are a couple steps missing from the commit message. Namely, you should assign your 'laptop' a static IP address, and connect it to the Aerohive with an ethernet cable. If you don't know the name of your ethernet interface, run ip link.

# ip addr add 192.168.1.101/24 dev eth0
# systemctl start tftpd
# curl https://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/targets/mpc85xx/p1020/openwrt-mpc85xx-p1020-aerohive_hiveap-330-initramfs-kernel.bin > /srv/tftp/openwrt-mpc85xx-p1020-aerohive_hiveap-330-initramfs-kernel.bin
# curl https://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/targets/mpc85xx/p1020/openwrt-mpc85xx-p1020-aerohive_hiveap-330-squashfs-fdt.bin > /srv/tftp/openwrt-mpc85xx-p1020-aerohive_hiveap-330-squashfs-fdt.bin
# curl https://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/targets/mpc85xx/p1020/openwrt-mpc85xx-p1020-aerohive_hiveap-330-squashfs-sysupgrade.bin > /srv/tftp/openwrt-mpc85xx-p1020-aerohive_hiveap-330-squashfs-sysupgrade.bin

Back in the console of the Aerohive (minicom,) first set the necessary environment variables, then use tftpboot to load the OpenWrt firmware directly into working memory.

=> setenv serverip 192.168.1.101                                                                                                                                                                                    
=> setenv ipaddr 192.168.1.1
=> tftpboot 0x1000000 192.168.1.101:openwrt-mpc85xx-p1020-aerohive_hiveap-330-initramfs-kernel.bin                                                                                                                  
=> tftpboot 0x6000000 192.168.1.101:openwrt-mpc85xx-p1020-aerohive_hiveap-330-squashfs-fdt.bin                                                                                                                      
=> bootm 0x1000000 - 0x6000000

You should be prompted to press ENTER eventually, and see the familiar OpenWrt splash screen.

Benchmarks

Clearnet Wireless Traffic

~ 70Mbps

Client connecting to 192.168.1.137, TCP port 5001 with pid 28923
Write buffer size:  128 KByte
TCP window size:  246 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[  3] local 192.168.1.204 port 34440 connected with 192.168.1.137 port 5001 (ct=1.75 ms)
[ ID] Interval            Transfer    Bandwidth       Write/Err  Rtry     Cwnd/RTT        NetPwr
[  3] 0.0000-10.1140 sec  72.0 MBytes  59.7 Mbits/sec  576/0          0       -1K/3708 us  2013.12

Yggdrasil Wireless Traffic

???