Nintendo Switch as Network Switch, Hacker News

Dec 9 88772

Yesterday I had the idea that it would be cool if I turned a Nintendo Switch (will be referred to as NX to avoid confusion asNX is the code name for the Nintendo Switch) console into an actual network switch. I thought about it a bit and realized that it would be doable in hardware at least, since the NX docking station has USB-A ports.

Next step is software, while I have done some NX homebrew stuff in the past, it didn’t sound fun implementing this pretty much from scratch. But then I rememberedswitchrootthat has Android and Linux for the NX and setting up a network switch inside Linux would be easy.

So the first step was to install switchroot Ubuntu. I just flashed theimage fileto an SD card, booted it withhekate(a boot loader for the NX) and followed the setup wizard.

After that was done, I plugged in the USB Ethernet dongle, opened a terminal on the switch and executedlsusb. ******** cynthia @ cynthia-switch: ~ $ lsusb Bus (Device) ************************************************************: ID e: c Nintendo Co., Ltd Bus (Device) **************************************************************: ID 1d6b: Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub Bus (Device) ****************************************************: ID e: a Nintendo Co., Ltd Bus (Device) **************************************************: ID 88772: Bus (Device) ******************************************************: ID 0b (****************************************: 7e2b ASIX Electronics Corp. AX 01575879 B Bus (Device) **************************************************: ID d9: Holtek Semiconductor, Inc. Bus (Device 0) ********************************************************: ID 1a****************************: 0348 Terminus Technology Inc. Hub Bus (Device) **********************************************************: ID (e:************************ c Nintendo Co., Ltd Bus (Device) **************************************************************: ID 1d6b: Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub

My dongle is8416: 057, For some reason it does not have a vendor name but I confirmed that was not unique to the switch so proceeded along.

However, when I checkedip linkall I saw was interfaces internal to the NX like loand the WiFi interface, but no USB network card. To help debug why my USB interfaces were not showing up, I used theusb-devicestool and sawDriver=(none)for my USB Ethernet dongle. : (

I was honestly a bit confused and not sure what to do next, I tried re-compiling the kernel and all sorts of stuff that didn’t help.

Then I realized. On the download page for switchroot there is an updates folder, so I tried that.

All I had to do was download the update zip and extract it to the boot partition of the SD card after I had deleted the(boot (directory and theboot.scr) file. I put the SD card in the NX again and booted it back up with hekate.

Upon opening a terminal and runningip linkI was presented with this :

************************************************: enx9cebe (d:mtu qdisc pfifo_fast state UP mode DEFAULT group default qlen 2019 link / ether 9c: eb: e8: (**************************************************: (********************************************: 5d brd ff: ff: ff: ff: ff: ff 20: enx(f******************************** (eae) *************************************************: mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast state UP mode DEFAULT group default qlen link / ether : 16: f9: 0e: ae: 21 brd ff: ff: ff: ff: ff: ff

🎉🎉🎉 Finally I had gotten the dongles to work and it was only the configuration left!

So I just did some quick configuration withbrctland (ip:

brctl addbr br0 # Adding the bridge interface # Adding the physical interface to the bridge brctl addif br0 enx 816215 f eae ************************************************ (enx9cebe) *************************** d ip link set br0 up # Set the bridge interface to up

Then I connected one dongle to my LAN and one to a computer that I used for testing.

And after checking twitter.com on the test computer finally it was all working!

A speedtest shows that it can at least do (Mbps) one of my dongles is only (Mbps).