Unlocking The Crippled Potential Of An Unmanaged Switch

[Sprite_TM] outgrew the features of the cheap unmanaged TL-SG1005D switch he was using on his home network. Instead of buying a new and much more costly switch he cracked the cheap one open and found that the RTL8366SB chip inside possessed the ability to work harder but was crippled for sale as a low-end model. It wasn’t as easy as that oscilloscope firmware upgrade we saw a while back. He had to add an AVR ATmega88 to send I2C commands to the switch. Turns out that the I2C protocol wasn’t standard and after much head scratching he found some Linux drivers for the chipset that gave him enough info to send the configuration commands he needed. Now he’s go the managed switch he needed for his VLAN for the cost of a microcontroller and some wire.

33 thoughts on “Unlocking The Crippled Potential Of An Unmanaged Switch

  1. This is genius!

    I have the 8-port model of that switch right here and i always wanted to have a managed switch. Although i dreamed of a cisco layer3 gbit fiberoptics switch, but a hacked TP-Link will do the trick :D

  2. The hack is not bad but you can buy used manageable 100mbit switches for a low price. Unless you keep copying avis from superfast server to superfast server2 all day long gbit is just a fancy toy for home networks.

  3. Gigabit is hardly a toy. Super fast file transfers regardless of file size, jumbo packets if you shop carefully, you hardly ever have your network saturated by something else (makes everything slow), and you get lower latency to boot. I’d never go back.

  4. Loanshark: Just checked: the cheapest managed 100MBit switch still is around EUR70 when you buy it new. Sure, you can buy one second-hand, but I doubt it’s gonna cost E17, and probably eats lots more electricity too.

  5. Nice tutorial, However, if you want to do something simillar without taking anything apart then try running dd-wrt on a £20 Linkssy/Buffalo switch.

    This will give you a bunch of managed functions:
    http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Tutorials

    ..and if you buy the right hardware even give you inter-vlan routing, 802.11q tagging and other advanced managed features.

    However any function that is performed on the CPU may be a fair bit slower than one performed in dedicated switching hardware- so keep that in mind when picking your solution!

  6. @rasz well da.ru is a site that the famous fosi used for his warez for one (before they kicked him off eventually), and I’m sure there are some other people who had some controversial sites on it, so you can see how that works.
    Fosi’s old spot now says “The site you are looking for is closed, due to non-ethical and/or abusive activity.” so I guess da.ru is now more mainstream.

  7. If you dont want to solder there is yet another way – OpenRRCP

    Software that can control a bunch of Realtek switch chips over the ethernet.
    You just have to get one of the switches with correct chip, like for example dlink DES-1016D

    Link to supported hardware under my nickname

    ps: “pupa” means ass in Russian :). Thats how i remembered address to the first hack.

  8. Rasz: Aah, I already saw a reference to the Realtek Remote Contol thingy in the datasheet, unfortunately that section wasn’t in the pdf… The project looks nice, it’s a bit unfortunate that it doesn’t support switches with more than just 1 or 2 GBit uplinks… Maybe it can be extended, though.

  9. “you hardly ever have your network saturated by something else (makes everything slow)”
    Lol don’t tell me you saturate 100mbit constantly on your home network. Of course gbit is good in office buildings and for isps but for home its pointless. I have cat6 cable in the wall but I don’t even thinking of replacing the switches with gbit. Lol if u have a 5mbit dsl conn then its double pointless.

  10. @loanshark

    Just because it doesn’t fit your use case doesn’t mean it’s useless to home users. While you are correct that most users will only use a small amount, I do saturate my network on a fairly regular basis pushing large movies around for my media server and ISOs for when I’m spinning up new virtual machines for testing. In the HAD crowd I doubt I’m a rare case.

    Amazing hack! This is the stuff I love seeing done, kudos to you sprite_tm. By the way, you’re right about managed switches using a ton of power. My Dell fully managed uses 150W and a Netgear Smart switch uses around 75W (both at idle). If I had seen this first I may not have either of them!

  11. @loanshark

    its not about constantly saturating the 100MB network. I have GB because i often need BURST speeds of 1GB when I transfer files. 99%.

    I use around 10MB for day to day stuff, once every few days I need to move a very large file around and then I don’t like (actually hate) waiting. So, for me its very important that when i need to i can burst to 1GB speeds.

  12. Listen up people, Hi to all by the way :P
    I wrote an update for source code for this hack. Everything is in comments on the original site, signed by my nickname. Now you can use this hack for v5.0 of TL-SG1005D.

  13. Hello, I’ve been wondering if anyone has tried this hack by using Raspberry Pi instead of Arduino board. If yes, I’d like to know the details if you don’t mind sharing.

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