My router died

My router died the heat death after many years of fateful service. Lets see if it is possible to bring it back.

The router is a RouterBoard 450G. Restarting the router did not help. Usually it beeps once after POST and then again twice when booted up. I was hearing no beeps at all, which led me to believe it was a hardware fault.

Here we can see the router with power but even connection the serial terminal didn’t give me any life sign.

Lets open it up and see if we can find anything wrong with the hardware.

Yes, there is the problem, did you spot it?

Lets zoom in for a closer look and some beautiful focus depth.

Awesome! That is something we can actually fix. A couple of days later I got the capacitors in the mail.

Here is an image of the work in progress. But it is really hard to take photos and solder at the same time. Desoldering the old caps is the most difficult part of the job. This image has one of the caps removed.

Thats it with the images. So did it work? Yep! It is still routing packages to this date. (2019-04-10) It will probably still work when i decommission it. It caps out at about 250Mb/s throughput which is exactly where my fiber connection saturates. We will see how long it will be used. The upgraded version of the RB450G is the RB450Gx4 and has a price tag of about $99. Not sure I would have gone with that one but at least I didn’t have to buy any new router.