Author Archives: admin

Oh! Humanity

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Onion used to my favorite satire newspaper before it was taken over by the wokes. When I was in college, some teaching assistants read us an article as a treat before starting a session. Here’s one of my favorite headlines. Here’s one of my favorite

Newborn Loses Faith In Humanity After Record 6 Days
https://www.theonion.com/newborn-loses-faith-in-humanity-after-record-6-days-1819573929
It took me 7 years. I guess I was slow.

I grew up in Hong Kong and I can tell you for sure that you are going to have a very hard time surviving there if you are not a hardcore cynic. People are very harsh to each other but most are sticklers to the rules and contracts to the letter (they believe in the rule-OF-law), to the extent that some might find them inflexible or outright cruel (this is especially true with bus drivers in Hong Kong nowadays) .

In other words, people there feel comfortable taking advantage of others, but 99.9% of time they do it within legal boundaries (like exploiting scenarios not considered when the contracts are drafted) as they are not bold legal risk takers. It’s not a forgiving city because Hongkong is geographically too close to the land of crooks so every sign of kindness we show are seen as signs of weakness ready to be exploited. Kindness just doesn’t pay in Hong Kong.

Socialist (Chinese Communist Party) is a shit-magnet, identifying the nastiest people in any population. Hong Kong Protests in 2019 showed me people aren’t predominantly bad. I might have picked up a little bit of faith in humanity again after seeing the spirits of the freedom-fighters. The scumbags I should have hated with passions are now wagging their tails and licking the boots of the Chinese Communist Party.

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E5070B / E5071B shutting itself down immediately after turning on

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Got a second customer coming in today with a E507XB series network analyzer that does not turn on. Looks like it’s a common problem within the model series.

If the unit turns on without the CMOS battery but it doesn’t turn on the 2nd time after the CMOS was cleared, you have a very expensive problem which likely I’m the only person who can solve it because it’s months of effort tracing the circuit and the timings inside. I regretted chasing down the rabbit hole and spent more labor than 3 good unit’s costs for the few grands I’ve charged, but I might be able to recoup the labor in the future as more of the E507XB fails the same way.

UNLESS it’s a SC815E (there are 2 revisions that uses different motherboard), it’s NOT the motherboard or the power supply. I’ve seen some faulty SC815E doing the same on other model series, but not the VP22s (I replaced 4~5 different VP22s, they all do the same thing). It’s some good timing issues that’s hard to pinpoint to a specific module (you can replace everything on the digital side and it still doesn’t work) which I had to design, build and test a special circuit to correct it.

If you have a unit E5060 series or E5070 series VNA (Vector Network Analyzer) that doesn’t boot, I’m likely to have the exact experience fixing it. Of course I’m open to solving other problems with the analyzer as well. I offer free eval (no fix, no fee). Please email me at owner@humgar.com or call me at 949-682-8145.

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Flashing router firmware through Serial Port: CFE bootloader (usually Broadcom) based routers

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Here’s a summary of learnings from dd-wrt’s serial recovery instructions:

  1. Use a UART controller that signals at 3.3V (e.g. FTDI TTL-232R-3V3) to talk to the board. Regular serial RS-232 ports requires a voltage level shifter converting the signal to swing between 0V to 3.3V.
  2. You only need 3 pins: Tx, Rx and Ground. There’s voltage contention if you plug in the Vcc from TTL-232R-3V3 (It’s the USB’s 5V despite the signaling is 3.3V) to the 3.3V supply of the router. You don’t need the Vcc pin. It didn’t harm anything or do anything when I connected the Vcc pin.
  3. Stick with all serial port defaults and only set the baud to 115200 (default is 9600) and turn off flow control (default is xon/xoff). I use Putty for terminal.
  4. The terminal serves as the monitor for the computer on the router that shows a text console. Broadcom uses CFE bootloader (others use U-Boot with busybox).
  5. CFE bootloader defaults to 192.168.1.1 with subnet mask 255.255.255.0 (aka /24). Set up the network interface to have a static IP on the same subnet to talk to the board.
  6. Good habit: nvram erase
  7. The flash program relies on TFTP protocol to receive the firmware file. So get your TFTP client ready. Microsoft included a TFTP client/server since Windows 7 but usually disabled (turn it on in Windows OptionalFeatures.exe).
  8. TFTP is a simple push(put)/pull(get) design. You can either “push a file on your computer” or “get a file as filename”. You’d want to specify -i switch (binary image transfer) with Windows tftp.exe.
  9. So type this command at the command prompt but don not press enter until your router is ready to grab the file: tftp -i 192.168.1.1 put {path to whatever TRX firmware file}
  10. Go back to the serial terminal and tell the router to accept a TFTP push (in a window of a few seconds before it time out) and flash the memory region flash1.trx with this command: flash -ctheader : flash1.trx
  11. Immediately initiate the TFTP push from your computer (Windows command line example in Step #9 above)
  12. Wait for a couple of hours! The terminal might tell you that it has received the file completely, but it won’t show anything when it’s writing to the flash! It’s a painfully slow process with no feedback. Just be patient!

Some observations

  • FreshTomato firmware absolutely won’t tell you on the screen after it has done flashing (Merlin-WRT does). Just turn the router back on after a couple of hours.
  • Merlin firmware repeats (exposes) the raw passwords to the serial port!
  • FreshTomato firmware boots to a linux prompt on the serial port

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