PCMCIA Cards Hiding in Linksys Routers

what if I told you there was an unexpected piece of Hardware hiding inside some of these routers a PC mcia card or PC card as they were later rebranded to in 1995 PC mcia cards can be thought of as a sort of precursor to USB an industry defined standard allowing flash memory modems Wi-Fi and all sorts of other peripherals to be plugged into laptops and computers here's a couple of PC card examples now it's my understanding that manufacturers such as lynus were already making these PC mcia Wi-Fi cards and so they would just make a slot inside their early routers for those to go in we'll crack into my linkis collection to hunt one down probably lose some driver battles to Linux trying to get it to work and Windows 7 won't cut us any brakes either let's get into it I have a few specimens for our adventure today now I'm pretty sure some of these have a PC card inside but I'm not sure which one so my thinking is we're going to crack open the oldest and physically largest ones I've got that leaves us with a few options this this and this are all be fw11 S4s and you can see they don't even have the Cisco branding on them so these were likely produced before Cisco bot Linkus in 2003 lynus like to make things smaller over time so I'm suspecting that this smaller one that has identical model to to these bigger ones here is actually going to be newer so we won't bother with that one which leaves us with the two big guys here now it is possible that these wrt54gs these Wireless G routers have PC cards inside them and in fact if you recognize this links this stuff you very likely reusing one of these 54 GS back in the day because lyus was still making Wireless G PC cards and it's possible that you know some variant of these without the nice edge here is actually inside some of these routers but we're going to try our luck with some B stuff first because it's older and that seems most likely to have what we want despite having the same model number and form factor there's actually quite a bit of between these two units so we've got the 2.4 GHz B advertised a little more prominently on this one and it's just a little simpler it calls itself a wireless access point router this thing is talking about instant Broadband series ether fast wireless access point it advertises itself as a cable DSL router so yeah quite a bit of difference here here they are from the top and the existence of the linkis logo here is pretty much a dead giveaway when you're glancing at these that Cisco wasn't involved soone CCO bottom they uh dropped that and just kept this original linkis lettering fun fact for you and I also noticed the antennas on this one on the left have a metal base so that's a metal connector there none of the other antennas have that including this let me pull one off for you so despite being roughly the same age that's plastic so I'm thinking this one on the left given that it's got the better hardware and sort of the older sounding marketing on the front of it is going to be our best but this is probably the oldest one it's probably worth noting that this one is the only one I have that has these really nice metal connectors none of these do that they all have the plastic ones except for if you bought this High Gain kind of range extender kit they're obviously much longer antennas they've got the nice metal on the end but that of course would have been like a luxury upgrade so to speak so yeah the rest are just plastic so the first thing we do of course let take the antennas off I can't get over how nice these ones are and then there's some nuts on the back of here those spin right off really easily on both sides then we void our warranty really quick here I'm going to give you some Insider info these rubber feet just as these things are aging just fall out I don't remember that being an issue back in the early 2000s and mid 2000s when I was using the 54g units they have the same Affliction all the feet just fall out this one is already missing one the remaining feet on this one aren't too loose yet but I don't know if they're the material is like shrinking as it ages or something but it's really common that they'll just fall right out and you don't even need to use a tool or they're already missing the front feet are hiding two tiny little screws and then I think you kind of just manhandle it a little bit uh and eventually you can get it to the antennas just fall into the case the antenna connectors um I'm going to do this very carefully and I'll be back yeah it doesn't take much you can kind of just push like this and it'll it'll separate without breaking anything or losing any plastic bits at this point we need to get the shield off and it's going to be a little bit annoying there's just Globs of little tiny Globs of solder all over the place it's not like a c64 or something where you can snip it off with Snips so I'll have to use the wick I think to get that off this is interesting some QA markings actually in Sharpie and pencil manually written some sort of verification pass they probably did at the factory quick look at the front so I am going to get these little solder blobs off if you aren't familiar with solder Wick you heat it up and apply it to solder and it quite literally Wicks the solder into this braid and it's not my preferred method desoldering but it's a really nice way to to clean work up after you've desoldered with you know the little pump gun or something and I think it's kind of my best bet right here but it's going to be exceedingly frustrating to get this off I think cuz even when I Wick this solder out there's still going to be a pretty good Bond I think on most of these points but we'll start with this and then we'll start getting some pry tools under it and uh see where that gets us this one's particularly tricky it's way back in there oh look at that though it's not actually connected ship that way from from the factory there's the solder wicking into the braid okay of course even after taking the solder off it's still basically fully attached so my thinking here is we'll start getting some some tools under here and I'll pry up I'm not particularly concerned about hurting this I'm not putting it I'm not going to put it back on anyway so it's just for shielding of some sort I'll let you know how I get along some of the points do actually come to the other side of the board so you can see where a little metal tab from this thing is poking out here but none of them actually have solder in them so all of them are free and I can't get I can't figure out how to get this plastic piece off of the board to get a better look it's got a simple clipping mechanism that I can't seem I can't seem to get it to budge well we're getting somewhere look at that I've resorted to taking the iron and sort of heating it up as I pry up with some other tool it's kind of hard to film we're very close I think if I just heat this up it's off and look at that we have a wireless B pcmcia card there's the slot it's connecting into it's got a little daughter board for oops the antennas yes I wasn't sure how many of these I was going to have to crack open until I found one and this old one proved to be the right choice the next question is does it come out easily we have to find out for science oh it's in this little tray okay I'm going to poke around a little bit I don't want to break anything this is fascinating it's not like a socket it's just some pins bent at a 90° angle and the card receives them that is fascinating look how they did that wow I think I need to get the board off this plastic backing because I need to unsolder this little case or this little holder that the daughterboard is in and I think this is why I couldn't just slide it off one of the posts has a screw in it you know I don't even know if this router works I probably should have tested it first there we go well I don't feel like desoldering those and I do want to put this back together and that would pretty much make it so it guarantees I would never put it back together so I'm just going to bend these little holding retainer clip things out of the way okay yep so now you can see it's lifting up can I slide yeah look at this there it is my wireless B PC mcia card now uh we get to plug it into a computer and it almost definitely won't work because it won't have drivers we'll see I guess here's that pin setup fascinating I suppose that's just what it looks like in a laptop just maybe a little sturdier really cool now we just need a computer to put this lyus PC card in and I think this IBM Thinkpad t60 is going to do the trick for us today Andy of Sunfire v440 donation Fame sent this my way a couple months ago and I've been looking for an excuse to try it out this thing came out in 2006 it's got a Intel Cino Duo Mobile in side 32bit I think this is the 60 GB hard drive model so this would have set you back like 1,400 bucks or something back in 2006 and this is a slightly historically significant ThinkPad in that it was the very last one that still had the IBM Thinkpad branding so Lenovo was fully involved and building these I mean you can even see the logo right there and the t61 the one right after this is when they dropped the IBM logo I think this machine tells a pretty interesting story about old meets new at least in terms of mid thousand Technologies it's got a built-in modem ethernet of course audio USB and of course the PC card slot which we'll be using today and on the other side more USB slots a DVD ROM really nice and under here got the hard drive bay and inside this thing has a SATA interface along with the cutest little spinning rust 60 GB Drive you've ever seen looks like was manufactured may07 it's a Hitachi 7200 RPM so this would have been pretty nice for this the day we're going to upgrade this this machine works just fine it's got Linux on it but I think a really nice upgrade we'll be throwing an SSD in there so we'll try that for fun see if we can get it working and then I'm really excited to try out my completely legitimate copy of Windows 7 Pro 64-bit that I bought back in college somehow this has survived like many many moves but anyway we're screwed I need a 32-bit version so we'll fire up the old uh DVD burner setup and I know I could just use a USB boot and all that that's still fun more fun this way and I've actually got a 32bit Windows 7 Pro key on the back of this thing so you know we're legitimate this would have shipped with Windows XP of course and more contemporary might have been you know Vista on here but I've been thinking about Windows 7 it came out in 2009 so this thing would have ran it and of course it has the sticker on the back so that's what we're going to go with let's get this hard drive in the caddy had these rubber bumpers on there there's nothing that actually holds it in other than the friction of these rubber bumpers actually quite hard to take out I thought I was going to snap this little pull handle they had on there so I think we need to get this tray off simple enough then the question is when I get all this back together is it going to line up like the other one did I wonder if it's going to have trouble with a one tab Drive I don't think so but we'll see here we go I can't really tell if it's in there we'll find out when we power it up I guess yeah just the rubber in there holds that in no screws or anything I took this apart months ago so I'm going to go hunt down that screw whenever I'm experimenting and taking something apart randomly and I'm not going to mess with it for a while I kind of put the screws over here and I'm not seeing it this might be it that might work that didn't work fix this the uh oldfashioned way for now and I'll have to hunt that screw down let's get this thing plugged in it's got some uh custom speed mods don't worry about that there we go it does hold a charge believe it or not see what we're working with here see if it recognizes that drive I suppose media test failure cannot boot from any device there we go we're we're in good shape though see CD ROM drive is first then USB then that drive I just installed and it does see that it's 1,000 gbt 1 terab so I think we're going to be okay I guess I don't actually know if this drive works but I assume it does okay control delete it's making driving noises see what happens there we go there is something therapeutic or nostalgic about installing Windows any version of Windows and I mean back when you were doing this back in the day this might have been like your only computer so if something went wrong you couldn't just like go on lios or whatever and do a search you figured it out by trial and error by yourself usually or if you're really desperate you like went to a buddy's house and used their computer to go on the internet you couldn't exactly pull out your cell phone I mean that wasn't going to help you beautiful I haven't installed Windows 7 in a very very long time might eat my words about usb being less fun it's been grinding away at 0% there for like 5 minutes I was just about to give up then we hit 1% 10 minutes in I might still give up I'm making a USB right now oh we're cruising we're sticking with the DVD we're in let's see what we're working with here yeah four gigs of RAM that's pretty good and it sees the whole hard drive of course let's see if we can improve our resolution a little bit maybe something like that yeso yeah this is a nice little laptop what version of iie did this thing come with eight so of course this thing already has Wi-Fi capabilities it's a little redundant but that's it's not the point so I'm going to shut this down for a second and show you something so here's the slot here's another PC card just a flat flash card from a Cisco router and when you push it in all the way it's flush and then this little guy helps you get it out right pretty simple now the problem is this one can't go in all the way because of the shoulders on the daughter card so you can see there's overlap there and it's going to stop it from going in all the way I am however making some contact so I haven't tried it these are hot swappable so let's power it back up and see what it does otherwise we might have to get a little uh creative so I haven't installed any of the Lenovo drivers or anything I'm kind of hoping it's smart enough to already have the PC MCI slot drivers we'll see so I'm going to slide it in I don't think it sees it so couple problems might need the drivers for this slot we'll check device manager in a second or it's actually not making it in all the way of course Windows does see the adapter bus so it's a physical connection issue that we're going to have to solve for the record the adapter is working you could hear it kind of complain real real faintly and then when I eject it it doesn't understand this card we know it's gone out so this thing works so I was hoping this daughterboard just pulled out but I sort of wiggled it and yanked on it you know a little bit and it seems like it's sort of one circuit board that they've encased here and I don't want to risk prying this up because that can be a pretty destructive process but I'm looking at these little ears and they just lead to empty pads so we' got traces coming into them and the pads don't go anywhere uh so I'm going to do something maybe a little controversial I'm going to snip them off so I'm going to score them with a knife and then break them off well if that broke it you'll just have to forgive me we're performing some science down here so the dream is that this is just a consumer card that linkis was throwing in those routers and windows sees it no problem at the very least I hope it recognizes something what I'm expecting is recognizing nothing or something it doesn't know what to do with so let's throw it in it sees it I haven't broken it entirely yeah doesn't have drivers for it okay but the card exists it's called an instant wireless network PC card that's a clue so let's go search that online I think it's one of these lynxis had an instant wireless network PC card that they of course sold which makes sense they just put these in the routers and only have to develop one thing so what I'm going to do is hunt down drivers for this and see where we get internet archive had some instant Wireless drivers oh no that's not good it's funny my windows 11 machine could open this setup file but uh Windows 7 doesn't like it honestly thought I'd be avoiding all this going with Windows 7 thought I'd be old enough oh no well keeping with the theme I burnt it to a disc and now it likes the installer look at this oh it's got noises when you click the buttons what are the chances of this working it's definitely just one of these WPC 11s so here we go restart that's not good doesn't recognize it all right I've got the oldest version of the drivers I could get my hands on install the PC card this is definitely an older installer not holding my breath Ah that's what the other drivers did it doesn't see it it won't even start if it doesn't think you have the adapter in there look at this icon real nice so again the adapter bus works and it sees that it has this instant wireless network PC card but it doesn't know what to do with it so I guess we'll try Windows XP [Music] well that was a nightmare I could not get Windows XP to install this thing I tried different isos USB burning discs and all the isos had the SATA drivers by the way made sure I had the Right iso nothing tried the F5 trick when you're booting up to try to configure things no matter what I did it would hang on setup as starting Windows I would leave it for 30 minutes to an hour you know I've had these things take a long time to get in past that screen but nothing so gave up but we've made some serious progress this thing is running a live CD of auntu 510 from late 2005 I think little Breezy Badger we've got the card in check this out we can do a card control ident it's in socket zero instant wireless network PC card but a little more info it says version 0102 little more information than what Windows told us you can also do card control info and then the slot get the same information just present it a little differently now if we do lspci of course we've gotten this far so we know this is true but the card bus bridge is obviously working it can see the card it knows it's there now I'm going to pull the card out and you're going to hear it beep once which means it knows it was removed okay going to put it back in you'll hear two high-pitched beeps that's this old card Control Systems way of telling you it thinks it's configured okay now we're going to look at D message which is going to tell us some information about all the hardware changes that are going on and here we can see it talking about this card it's saying it's a interel firmware 076 it's not liking it it's saying intercell firmware earlier than o.8 several features might not be supported and it has a station name of prism 1 now I've been able to find other cards that use the prism 2 chipset from intersil including later versions of the linkx this instant wireless network PC card but I don't see anything using prism 1 just some Prism 2 examples so I'm thinking this is a pretty old card and I definitely couldn't find any version of the software as early as 1.02 there was only a couple versions on the archive and you saw me install them but here's where it gets really interesting if we issue an IW config which is like if config but for wireless devices in the Linux World it sees it it's got a prism 1 nickname it knows it's got the right frequency and speed it just doesn't have a station to connect to so I think it's working on Linux could that be possible Linux Wireless networking from the early 2000s easier than Windows hard to believe let's try to get this thing connected to a network I could just connect it to my home network but that wouldn't be any fun let's pull this other one off the stack and see if it works uh this one seems incredibly unhappy number seen him do that before I guess I'll try resetting it there's a button on the back yeah that one's not doing so hot I should have pulled the card out of that one let's try this little guy yes much healthier let's see if we can talk to it this is a Windows XP machine hooked up to that router on the same default Network we might have to reset it I don't think I've ever used that one before so it might already be configured and that's what it's looking like you just press in this little button on the back for 30 seconds or so and now we can access it it's been reset I think it's admin no password no password no password just admin password okay I want to say these older ones just start blasting out a network that's right linkis uh let's make sure we don't have any of those in the neighborhood clabsis okay that thing's got a wireless network going this computer is hardwired as 19216811 so let's see if we can get that laptop online it's been a really long time since I've used IW config it's odd that it calls it eth zero I would expect it to call it WL zero so maybe that's some foreshadowing think you just go like this yeah okay we've we've we've got a problem we were so close uh I needed to Pudo so now it thinks eth zero is on clabsis I have config still sees nothing but maybe that's fine all right 5 hours later here's what I know everything's reset now I can set an SID just like this and if we go back it's got it set now over an if config it sees it it knows it has an eth zero it's called eth zero I was doing some research older devices will call themselves eth zero even though they're Wireless L we can use the IW list command and if we say eth zero scanning to see if it's able to scan it says it can't so that's clue number one that we're fighting with drivers right now and now what we're going to do is try to bring that interface up and we get a connection timed out and and if we go to good old D message again we're getting tons of complaints about not able to issue commands to the card and these set codes unknown key pressed can't enable the Mac Port all sorts of errors that really yeah is error issuing commands this really implies to me we're having driver issues I tried to throw auntu 404 on here hoping that it might support this intersil 076 and it just hangs I can't get it to load or install or anything so we're having the classic fight against device drivers I thought about cracking this broken One open you know the one that was doing the diag light blink thing just visually this is quite a bit newer looking but you'll have to trust me when I say um well first I couldn't get it open I can't figure out how to get it apart but I'm looking through these little vent holes and there is not a card in there so it's definitely a different design a more modern design oh yeah and after you issue the if config up to try to bring eth zero up it loses a ton of itself and they uh you can't fix it until you physically pull the card out and put it back in again big mess well I was actually able to get the auntu 4 live CD going isn't this a site for Sor eyes at least as we're struggling through this we get to look at these old auntu versions and be nostalgic about them but it's pretty much the same story in D message it thinks it's a Hermes chipset we're getting errors about -16 issuing command we saw that before it knows it's a prism one chipset it's got the same interal firmware earlier than 0 eight not supported probably our main issue here so we're buding up against a few obstacles here the first one is this card is just really old so it claims in at least in the station name that it's a prism one chip intercell firmware version complaints about how old it is even in this older version of Linux there's several Linux drivers out there one is the ironico that's what we're trying to use here which should support the prism chipsets but I don't see anything that supports prism 1 I only see mentions of prism 2 so that's our biggest problem here another obstacle is just you know my will to live I'm sure we could get a version of Linux installed on here and start messing with the drivers and playing around and finally finding an old one assuming there is an old one that supports this older prism chip but it's pretty combersome this is my only physical PC mcia slot I own so right now I've been resorting to live CDs auntu 4 was the first abun to live CD so I can only mess around so much it's not like I can roll back a VM really easily and play around with drivers I'm still willing to call this a win because this thing even recognizes it so like it feels like a driver issue I'm going to subject you guys to one more OS attempt here I've got a copy of Debian 3 from 2002 my thinking is Debian was a little slower to take in drivers this thing is from 2001 or so 2000 so hopefully by 03 they had drivers that would support this older guy I'm going to perform a full install of that and if that doesn't work we'll uh we'll have a PC mcia consolation surprise to take a look at well that was shortlived this version of Debian doesn't appear to have SATA drivers and to my aforementioned point about will to live I don't want to deal with that today so let's get into the consolation PC mcia prize Well I'm a little disappointed this was going to be a pretty bitching setup I have to admit we're lucky that we even found one and I'm really impressed that Windows sort of understood it and we could glean a lot of information from Linux that was pretty cool again just a driver issue I found folks online from 20 plus year old Forum posts complaining with very similar D message logs about prism 1 and that old firmware and the suggestion seems to be to flash newer firmware onto these but even if I could find that I don't know if I'd want to do it because I wouldn't be able to put it back on the router or I highly suspect that with different firmware it's not going to work in this thing so that would be disappointing but I've got Windows 7 almost done installing on that thing again and we're going to be taking a look at this a linky wireless G notebook adapter complete inbox we'll open it up see what's inside it also does Wireless B this is our PC mcia consolation prize for the video we'll at least get one PC card working today that complete inbox Wireless G card can do wireless B too so obviously we're going to be needing this guy by the way there are some inell prism drivers online for Windows XP I did try those and they didn't work interestingly enough the error message it shows about not finding the adapter is exactly the same as the Linka stuff we saw earlier so they must have been sharing software let's see what we've got I think it's new inbox but I I have been fooled by shrink wrap before so fun buying the complete in box stuff you know and it's I think this was like $10 shipped or something start here run CD first before connecting your device this makes you appreciate just how good USB is you just really this does look new by the way you really just don't have to do any of this crap anymore you just plug stuff in got our registration card fill that out later some sort of quick start guide nothing nothing special oo game adapters we'll be covering that in a future video offering some of their stuff Wireless compact flash cards now that's something that would be interesting let's open this guy up can I save this sticker do I even care I can look at that uhhuh brand new yeah so obviously they were making these and in some of these older units here they would just slap them in the router it's for Windows XP maybe Windows 7 has been our problem this entire time but we're going to try it in the Windows 7 machine it doesn't appear to be able to read the disc oh my God the heck we're also under attack oh oh jeez yeah it can't read this disc this is version 3.1 which of course is not on the archive so it would have been nice to have been able to Archive this I'll try it in my other machine well I don't know I was able to read it on another machine and burn an ISO and I've got it mounted here let's uh see where we get Linkus love their special little installer uis moment of truth it's asking me after the installer to insert the adapter we have a power light it sees it it's installing the driver so that's good I think we just go next and then nothing happens open up the program I guess here's the software uh site survey adapter is inactive I don't know I'm going to be optimistic yet again and assume this is working I just need to choose a SSID to connect to let's get the other one hooked up this will obviously work perfectly oh my God it's doing the same thing as the other one is this the wrong power adapter I always forget linkis used to be all 5 volts and then they switched everything over to 12 so I think it's fine that means the other one's probably fine too just pretend you didn't see that anyway this is going to work great this thing doesn't seem to be able to scan I guess I'll make a guess I'll edit this one yeah I don't think this program likes Windows 7 very much but over in the windows adapter settings it knows about the linkis wireless G and I think I can say connect and there's cabis excellent signal strength from our uh super antennas yeah even though we're connected the software driver must drive that link light uh but Windows took over so I think we've done it folks we've officially connected to a network with a PC card well this wasn't exactly where I was hoping this project would end up but I'm going to still call it a win we found one of these PC cards and we got it working these PC mcia cards are pretty fun to play with I've got a few more on the way and I think this was just a driver issue I wasn't exactly doing myself any favors pulling one of these out of a router we'll have more PC card stuff in the future and a word of warning a lot of the time because of the small thin form factor they would have a dongle so this would slide into the computer and some sort of cord was coming out of it for your modem or Ethernet or whatever the case may be and it'll be very common that you can find one of the cards but not the dongle which renders the card useless so just watch out for that this kind of gave me some flashbacks of dealing with Linux wireless adapters back in the day yeah I could sit down get Linux on this machine and and mess around with this for hours and hours I might someday you know crack a few beers and do that I don't know if I'll film it but I'll have an update if I do but yeah I've been there done that I was there when it was written I don't I don't need to do it again I was pretty ecstatic just to be able to identify this thing in Linux and see it and windows recognized it as well I hope you enjoyed following following along sorry about the screen capture quality I couldn't get this thing to Output VGA to my capture card but if you like stuff like this and want to support the channel you can check me out on patreon I try to post behind the scenes type footage early releases that sort of thing please consider subscribing I hope to see you in the next video and thanks for watching

Channel: clabretro

Views: 475,597

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Id: w_kBbu4Ov48

Length: 34min 46sec (2086 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 26 2024