Hello,

I'm having trouble logging into my Sagemcom F@ST5355 router via serial. The router was supplied by my telco, and is based on the Broadcom BCM63168 MIPS CPU.

I can see the whole bootlog, but when it finishes initialising it seems to leave me in the kernel and I don't have a shell or any options for logging in.

Is there a key I need to press while the router is booting to give me shell access? Is it common for routers to not expose a shell to the user over serial?

Thanks in advance.

Pressing the Enter key should suffice. If that doesn't work, then ensure your TX line is connected correctly. RX line seems to be fine since you see the bootlog.

If this doesn't help, then post a copy of the bootlog. It might reveal details as to why things are not working the way they should.

Serial console access in Linux is a fully configurable option with quite many levels where it can be adjusted. It is often enabled for diagnostic access, but nothing prevents a system builder from disabling the access entirely.

Thanks for getting back to me.

TX is connected properly, I can use SysRq commands which is what lead me to believe that its stuck in the kernel.

The bootlog is at:
pastebin.com/Cjm1hCpG

This telco is renowned for sinking its tentacles deep into their routers, and they really don't like people doing anything remotely custom with them. The router itself didn't even come with a manual, just a quick start guide, and some dude on their forum had to make an adhoc manual for other customers. Serial being severly handicapped would not surprise me at all.

I'm not sure if this is worth mentioning, but the end goal of this excercise for me is to find some SIP credentials on the router, as I would like to completely remove their hardware and run my own Asterisk instance for our VOIP service. Do you know if this information would be stored on the router, or would they have some other authentication method?

I have the same device and the boot log looks exactly the same. I received this 5355 from Telstra in Australia. It is heavily locked and I can’t find any way to get a shell or stop the auto boot. I examined the whole board trying to find a JTAG access. There seems to be none. Hopefully someone can help here. I would like to install a different webui and maybe try to get VPN service running on it.

I wouldn't bother with trying to improve this thing, its only got 100M ethernet anyway, its a pile of garbage.

I did manage to stop the boot one time though. If you spam enough keys over serial as soon as you power on, then it does stop and ask for some option but I've only managed to get into that once and there didn't seem to be anything interesting there