Cap AC out of disk space after installing wireless-qcom-ac

RouterOS General
1

Hi,

After updating my cap ac to use wifi-qcom-ac it has run out of disk space (yesterday when I installed there was still free space)

The sum of both packages doesn’t occupy the full 16MB

/system/package/print 
Columns: NAME, VERSION, BUILD-TIME, SIZE
# NAME          VERSION  BUILD-TIME           SIZE     
0 wifi-qcom-ac  7.18.1   2025-02-28 11:31:28  2680.1KiB
1 routeros      7.18.1   2025-02-28 11:31:28  11.5MiB

I suspect the disk space is being taken by charts data (which I have changed no not store on disk)

I have found an old backup in /files and deleted and now have 8Kib free, but even that seems not enough to even save config changes. I get the error

“could not save configuration changes, file system error.”

Is there a way to free up space? (logging is already going into memory and not disk)

/system/resource> print 
                   uptime: 20h21m29s          
                  version: 7.18.1 (stable)    
               build-time: 2025-02-28 11:31:28
         factory-software: 6.44.6             
              free-memory: 37.9MiB            
             total-memory: 128.0MiB           
                      cpu: ARM                
                cpu-count: 4                  
            cpu-frequency: 448MHz             
                 cpu-load: 0%                 
           free-hdd-space: 8.0KiB             
          total-hdd-space: 16.0MiB            
  write-sect-since-reboot: 6805               
         write-sect-total: 5659849            
        architecture-name: arm                
               board-name: cAP ac             
                 platform: MikroTik

I can’t figure out where the disk space is being used

This is what files shows (don’t know who created that backup and I can delete it) but even deleting it is probably not going to take me very far

/file> print recursive detail 
 0 name=flash type=disk last-modified=2025-03-07 12:01:08 

 1 name=flash/auto-before-reset.backup type=backup size=21.6KiB last-modified=1970-01-01 00:00:22 

 2 name=flash/skins type=directory last-modified=1970-01-01 00:00:19 

 3 name=flash/pub type=directory last-modified=1970-01-02 01:43:07

After a reboot I now have 144.0KiB free (have no idea what was cleaned up)

I guess one way to make it better is to use wireless-qcom instead of wireless-qcom-ac (I only care about wpa3, wireless-qcom-ac doesn’t give me that much of a speed boost (which I don’t need anyway)).

(note: this is not using capsman but I would like to :slight_smile:)

Any tips?

Thank you

2

This will not work. wifi-QCOM is only for AX devices.


Netinstall.
Sometimes pieces of config are left behind when upgrading to various versions. Over time this accumulates.
Space on cAP AC is already tight since it only has 16Mb but if really want to squeeze everything out, netinstall is the way to go.

Make sure to export (not backup !!) your config and move away from device so you can import it again (block by block via terminal) after netinstall.
And do verify the export is complete.

3

Bummer, I thought ac was optimized for AC and was more resource intensive but would still work on supported AC devices. My bad

I was afraid of that :frowning: Was hoping there was something magical that could do the trick, I will have to bite the bullet.

Thank you

4

Netinstall is the magic bullet. You can select “Keep old configuration” in Netinstall GUI. Netinstall CLI for Linux keeps the configuration by default. So you won’t lose anything of your configuration. But most probably you can regain some free space.

Create a backup before doing Netinstall. Yes, Backup, not Export. Best to upload it to Mikrotik cloud. In case something goes wrong - you can restore fast and with ease.

5

I do understand why but be aware when you restore that backup, you will simply bring the problems back.
Hence my focus on NOT using backup/restore for this case.

6

It’s most likely the same issue that is discussed here.

It seems that the backups do contain some data that are not actually necessary, but even exporting the configuration as text and certificates as .crt ; .key or as .pkcs12 files and reimporting all that to a netinstalled device does not make the issue completely disappear, it just leaves enough free space that it does not get totally exhausted except if the configuration is really huge. In my case, the free space occupation grows in 4 kByte steps (and establishments and terminations of SSTP tunnels definitely trigger that), but after 128 kBytes of space get occupied this way, RouterOS frees that space again and the cycle repeats. Configuration modifications seem to only increase disk usage, so if you do too many of them, you may have to export the configuration and netinstall again even if the configuration is actually not that huge.

I have opened a ticket on this at Mikrotik when 7.16.2 was released but I haven’t got any update on it ever since sending them a supout some weeks ago. Nor have any patch notes mentioned this until now.