A few months ago, I was out installing an extension for our 3Com NBX phone system at a remote location. When I do so, I put in a SonicWall TZ170 10 Node firewall/vpn/router appliance so that the phone can communicate over a VPN connection to the home office. Well, I was in a hurry and pulled a power brick from the box of stuff I was bringing and plugged it into the SonicWall. About this time I realized that the NBX phone power brick used the same barrel connector as the SonicWall, except at 24 volts vs. 5 volts.

I'll spare you the detailed description of my feelings of complete inadequacy, but suffice it to say that I beat myself up over that one for a while. I've had it sitting on my desk here as a reminder for about 6 months and I think it's time to go.

So here's my offer: If you are qualified to diagnose what I fried (it may be as simple as a fuse somewhere, I don't know) and bring it back to life, you can have yourself a free SonicWall. Keep it, sell it for profit, do what you want with it...I don't care. I just hate for a $350 appliance to go in the garbage. Not to mention that my feelings of guilt would subside significantly if it was returned to working condition.

Here's the catch: if you can't get it to work, you must promise to give it away on this forum to someone else who thinks they can fix it or provide good reason not to (ie...the SonicWall chip is fried.) First person to fix it can keep it.

First person to PM me gets the first shot.

First person to PM me was tfabris. (No surprise there...bots are pretty fast. )

I'm hoping this router will (a) work with a fuse replacement, and (b) let me configure a Windows VPN client dial-in (the Linksys one we bought didn't work for the task).

If not, I'll offer it up here again.

Good luck...it's all surface mount. Some of it appears to still work. The WAN and OPT jack LED's still light up when something is plugged in, but the LAN ports don't respond at all. The http interface doesn't appear when plugged into the LAN ports, of course.

Ah, I thought it was completely dark... Didn't realize it was partially working....

Perhaps you should offer it to someone else then (if you haven't shipped it already)... If it's not something simple like a fuse, then there's no way I can diagnose it. Of course, if it's an SMT fuse somewhere, I can definitely do that.

I'll let you take a shot at it anyway. It'll ship tomorrow. It's just as easy to move it on to the next person if you can't figure it out.

Okay, cool.

Every time I see stuff like this happening on the BBS, I think of the Eddie Murphy SNL sketch where he gets made up as a white person, and realizes that white people secretly "just give each other stuff"...

Okay. There's not a single fuse on the unit, even SMT fuses.

The unit won't even do its reset-test mode (where you hold down the reset switch while applying power). Doing that is supposed to make its test light blink, and it doesn't.

I'm guessing it's completely fried somewhere, but I can't see any obviously-blown components. The board looks pristine and new. There's a testpoint on the middle of the motherboard that's supposed to deliver 3 volts, and it does, but without a service manual I wouldn't know where else to start looking.

Who wants it next?

*bump*

I'm unable to repair this unit myself. Anyone else want to have a crack at it?

Is the power directly connected to any large ASICs?

It's hard to tell, with my limited knowledge. It appears to go through some power supply circuitry that splits it out into separate rails such as 3v and 5v and whatnot, and those go directly into some of the bigger chips on the board.

The fact that the unit seems to partially power up, but it won't do anything with its "logic" such as doing a power-on-reset-test, indicates to me that one of those power supply rails is fried, or as you're suspecting, one of the ASICS is fried.

Fried in a way that isn't detectable by eye, of course. I can't see anything obviously blown on the board.

Can you trace the power circuitry to see if any of it is dead?

The only part I was sure of, the 3v rail, is functioning correctly and delivering 3v as it's supposed to.