Mon Oct 16, 2023 3:28 pm
I fixed it.
I kinda screwed up. I ordered a used RB260GSP that was unnaturally cheap. I knew it was an old one, and I thought that was the reason... But upon trying to enter the web interface, I quickly realized, that no, that was not, in fact, the reason. It exhibited all symptoms of the bug described here. Web interface stuck on loading, no TFTP upgrade, no matter what I tried. I knew I'd receive support neither from the individual I ordered it from nor from MikroTik. I mean, I certainly wouldn't offer warranty service for a device that was purchased years ago by another person entirely. So I decided to play around with it.
I noticed that, while I entered the address '192.168.88.1' into the address bar, it would redirect me to '192.168.88.1/index.html'. That got me thinking. This was kind of the only way that I could communicate with the switch that worked. What if there were other pages of the web interface that would be functional, to some degree? I entered '192.168.88.1/upgrade.html' into the address bar, and, to my astonishment, I got a form that said 'Choose file...'. So I did. There was no submit button, because, normally, it would be a different part of the page, so I added my own with the 'Inspect Element' feature of <insert modern browser name here>.
I pressed the submit button, the firmware got uploaded, and I got redirected to '192.168.88.1/upgrade', I guess from completing the POST request. I then tried to go back to '192.168.88.1/index.html'. It got garbled with some nonsense data, so for a moment I thought that I'd bricked it further and that the firmware was corrupted beyond repair after all. But I went back to the upgrade page, and it still was fine. I knew I was onto something, so I decided to compare with my other RB260GSP, the new version. I unplugged the old RB260GSP from power. I then plugged in the new RB260GSP, and inspected the interface. I found that the submit button that normally upgrades the firmware also sends a reboot signal to the router. Having a good feeling about it, I unplugged the new RB260GSP and plugged in the old.
It worked. The interface was fully functional.
And now I got a shiny old RB260GSP.