Its almost like a mad ghost of dead company Mellanox is roaming the Earth, messing with anyone trying to bring up such a switch at cents on the dollar with firmware it wasn't sold with. On Feb 25th 2022 I bricked the first switch I touched and later that day it became clear that I probably had a wiped bootloader. Game over. Owhhh fsck. Fsck fsck fsck. I think I am in the same homelab camp as gb00s. Homelab that just lost one MLAG leg.
About two years ago I created a folder with information, firmwares etc., intent on buying some clusterable switches on the cheap, either Mellanox or Arista. Turns out Mellanox. So now I had the choice: Put up a fight to reflash the switch, or give up? With 30 years of electronics and embedded experience, I decided to fight. I was willing to put in the time and even more money to bring the switch back. Knowing full well that even if I bought a JTAG unit for the price of a single switch, and a new switch, too, opportunity cost vis-a-vis my day job's billing rate would be way way higher when fighting to reflash.
I already told in the other big Mellanox thread that it was very difficult for me to obtain detailed manuals and BDI firmware capable of talking to the SX6012 PPC 460EX chip. What I didn't tell was the lengths I went to to find and contact people who were in any way involved with AMCC's PPC endeavour. Be it Linux ppc commits, U-Boot bring up of an obscure eval kit, or random Italian people casually mentioning 460EX on a long forgotten e-mail list. Getting mad at just how bad Google has become at finding such "old" stuff. Switching to Yandex and Bing. Appreciating archive.org. Finding out that basically every company involved has either been bought or dissolved. Followed people's tracks, finding obituary from 2014. Scanned all Abatron ebay listings worldwide for hints on pp4xx firmware. Went on Aliexpress, Alibaba, Taobao to look for contact who might have firmware. Checked Lauterbach TRACE32 availability and licensing, which was none or insanely expensive. Subscribed to obscure Mandarin-only "AmoBBS" where someone from Beijing posted he had worked on ppc4xx with Abatron, to find they want $$$ to even be able to message people. Never got that invite to "sonsivri.to" BBS where similar conversation happened. Mailed Indian-descent people who worked for AMMC but who no longer exist. Wow, sjit excuse the french. Explored alternate avenues by reading up on the entire xbox360 NOR flash modding with clip history. Read the entire history of u-boot commits for ppc400 (removed in 2017, because no longer used by anyone) to make a list who to mail to next. Thought about how to get ahold of retired Abatron founders Rudolf Dummermuth and Max Vock in Switzerland. Drive there? Call neighbours listed in the phone book? Switched default search engine to Bing. Looked for BDI users on Twitter, messaged a few. Looked again into bdi3k clones from Taobao. Found NXP PPC lineage but PowerDebug really is only good for their chips. Studied OpenOCD documentation and code. Went over some NORway Teensy code's programming algorithms for NOR flash, and guess what, nobody employed SLC Strata Flash in consumer game consoles so there was no compatible code written that would have worked out of the box. Tracked down new old stock of the NOR flash chips on Aliexpress should I have to go down that path and needed chips to debug Teensy code first. Loaded Mellanox U-boot into Ghidra to check various low level init functions, because "Canyonlands" eval kit for 460EX had this CPLD which needed to be mapped into some address space and a byte with zeros has to be written to it, to disable hardware write protect of flash and EEPROM chips. I suspected (wrongly) Mellanox might have a similar feature and back then, I did not have that 1600+ page user manual of the 460EX. Opened a ticket at Mellanox because well GPL, could they send me the source code for their U-Boot fork. No answer yet. ;-) Read GPL license to find out they only need to do this for 3 years, well maybe they read that too.
And finally, after a few days of leaving no stone unturned, I almost would have not gotten a certain ZIP file from somebody I wrote to, because my mail server turned him away with intentionally non-descript "550 5.1.1 User unknown" upon detection of a Windows executable in the mail. Only by accident I found this in the rspamd logs while looking for something else.
I don't have the slightest doubt that the ghost of Mellanox and the Universe wanted that switch dead and in a recycling bin. But when they saw me pulling up old 460EX BDI configs that I scraped from mailing list posts in vscodium, to rewrite them for Mellanox specifics, they gave up and moved on. Moved on to you perhaps.
Long story short, I have no doubt Cruzader is right. But. But I strongly suspect if you invest a little of your time to figure out how to contact a Pitney Bowes that doesn't want to be contacted, making it easy for them to identify your parcel when they see it (mine came in a 90x60x30 server box), who sent it, who are you, how to contact you swiftly, why contents are very important for you, always asking, if you can't help me yourself, do you know who can, then I guess this will turn up at your door. Do you have a fax machine? I keep a very well-greased hylafax + YajHFC around just for such occasions. I'd send a letter to every company in UK that I can pull out of public company records that is named "Pitney Bowes". Call the front desk. They will be surprised, because not even 1 in 10,000 is this persistent. Everyone else writes the parcel off and ebay pays them back and that's the end of it.
Of course there has to be a plan B. You could switch brands, jump on flightics.com fly to Israel for 100, buy a cheap Arista 7050 for 300, fly back with night machine. An Andy von Bechtolsheim machine and you can tell it. AMD x86 control plane and merchant silicon.
It took me a while to write this. Even exported ungoogled-chromium history to reconstruct bits. Anyway, thanks for reading. I'm subbing this thread, would be interested in how things turn out.
