Hello everyone.
I did put my hands on a old Penguin Arctica 4804i-r Switch.
Not too impressive these days as far as speed/power goes. The thing that is impressive on it though is that it is running cumulus OS.
Cumulus OS is basically a Debian distribution for switches (with full shell, APT and stuff). Based on that, you can imagine what potential such a beast can have.
I just have 2 complaints about that OS. The first one is that the amount of switches supported is quite limited (It was supposed to be for datacenter switches only… But I would be very happy to see that kind of stuff on little switches that anyone could buy for home-use).
The other thing is that the OS got somehow acquired by Nvidia.
Now that they license stuff, I feel like I can’t really do anything to upgrade the switch to a more modern version of Linux or anything. Cumulus Networks · GitHub
Not that I want to put it in Prod (Power-PC architecture tends to eat a lot of power)
But I would like to have it as a possibility and know that there is an alternative to get a free software switch. (Penguin computing also does more modern versions of that switch with less power consumption and high speed ports)
I don’t know if people here are familiar with Cumulus OS, if people did already compile it and if whatever NVidia left public is sufficient to try and recompile it. What I know is that my switch contains the kernel parameters to know what to compile in it.
I wonder if doing something like OpenWRT could be possible (and if yes, how hard would it be?)
Are there already forks of Cumulus? Is it still possible to compile/modify?
Do I basically need to start everything from scratch?