After saving a £300, 16-port Ubiquiti network switch from getting tossed into the trash, [Buy It Fix It] got the honor of trying to repair it. With four ports and their associated PoE function having some major issues it looked like it might take some debugging, but after taking the lid off, the cause seemed rather obvious.

One of the Broadcom BCM5911 controller chips had a rather suspicious chip of the plastic packaging missing, with additional probing of connected components showing that numerous MOSFETs and a diode having had their proverbial guts blown out and were shorted as well. Whatever happened to some connected Ethernet device would appear to have left a serious trail of damage that nearly wrecked the entire switch.

The biggest challenge here was probably to find a replacement for the Broadcom IC, as this isn’t an IC that stores like Digikey or Mouser stock any more. Fortunately it was still available for sale over at AliExpress for £1.84, with the usual caveat that it could be salvage, fake, a factory reject, etc. In this case it appears that it was a legit Broadcom IC, with the four affected ports springing back to life including powering a PoE camera.

With a total cost of about £5 plus the time invested it wasn’t a bad deal to save a pretty nice PoE switch with 16 Ethernet and 2 SFP ports.

As software updates cease for operating systems, they eventually begin to lose access to parts of the LAN and internet due to out of date encryption features, as well as the inability to handle file sharing protocols like SBM3, which is somewhat of a necessity if you have e.g. a NAS on the LAN. Such too was the case with [watermark_hd]’s 20-year old PowerPC Macs and their installations of OS X Tiger and Leopard.

Cue Aqualink, a native SMB3 client for these older OS X versions that uses [Ronnie Sahlberg]’s libsmb2 server/client library for SMB2 and SBM3. The source code can be found over on GitHub, along with a Japanese translation. By using a local WebDAV server Tiger’s built-in mount_webdav feature can be used to mount these remote volumes.

While you can often still use SMB1 even on modern Windows and Linux/BSD via Samba, allowing even retro systems like these PowerMacs to speak SMB3 is at least a great boost for network security, even if the aforementioned encryption shortcomings mean that you cannot quite run encrypted file shares yet.

Although OS X eventually began to adopt modern SMB versions, some of us may remember how incredibly buggy they were, to the point that us OS X users often had to fall back to CIFS (SMB 1.0), so this is another potential use for this Aqualink application.