I would like to upgrade routeros on chateau 5g. Last year there was no problem with upgrade.
Now when i try to upgrade packages it says
upgrade failed, free 93 kB of disk space
System resources says:
Free HDD Space 208 KiB
Total HDD Size 16.0 MiB
I’m just curious how to make an upgrade in the future ?
Is theres any possibility to free up the space ?
Its comes as a bit of a shock to me, that router i bought for around 500 euros has only 16mb of flash memory…
For now i upgraded with netinstall, but what about automatic upgrades ? Can it be fixed ?
The good Mikrotik guys were IMHO a bit “tight” when designing these devices (32 Mb would have likely been possible at the time with very little price difference) but it is what it is.
They are trying to reduce the footprint of the OS, but I wouldn’t expect miracles, since at every release they add new (sometimes useful to only few users) features.
With a 16 Mb device one needs netinstall - as you found out - in most cases, but unless you really-really need a given bug correction or some security issues come out you don’t really-really need to update frequently if your setup works.
There’s another path (possibly a tad easier) instead of netinstalling … available from ROS version 7.13 onwards:
mark package wireless / wifi-qcom / wifi-qcom-ac driver (whichever is installed on device, in case of @OP it may be wifi-qcom-ac or wireless) for uninstallation
reboot device
upgrade device in usual way
reboot device (it’s part of previous bullet)
download wireless package (the same type as it used to be installed before executing bullet #1 above).
One has to download it manually by visiting https://mikrotik.com/download, selecting same ROS version as is now running on upgraded device (e.g. 7.16.1) and same architecture (e.g. ARM for Chateau 5G) and downloading “Extra packages” archive. Then open the archive and extract needed package (e.g. wifi-qcom-ac-7.16.1-arm.npk)
upload extracted package from previous bullet to device (root of storage, don’t go into any of subfolders which might exist in files)
reboot device (it’ll install the uploaded package) and verify that package actually got insalled
In my (limited and possibly outdated) experience this way configuration (also of wireless / wifi) is kept intact … But regardless, bullet #0 should probably be “create backup and configuration export, copy both off device”.
It is possible, that (re)installation of wireless / wifi drivers fails with error of insufficient storage space. In this case the only way forward is to go the netinstall way … and quite possibly it’s not possible to restore backup-ed configuration, one has to configure device from defaults (by peeking at configuration export, created in step #0).
And a recommendation: when configuring devices with tight storage, avoid creating any kind of lengthy address lists (where lengthy is anything longer than a few tens of addresses). Address lists tend to consume quite some of permanent storage (my estimation is around 10 bytes per IP4 address and around 35 bytes per IPv6 address) … when number of list members goes into thousands, required storage goes into tens of kilobytes … which is significant when remaining storage space is a couple of hundred kilobytes.
The device has an operating system preinstalled and licensed. No separate purchase is necessary and the product is ready to use. The device includes free software updates for the life of the product or a minimum of 5 years starting from date of purchase.
I bought it around 3 years ago..
I kindly ask for some official answer will it be possible to receive updates for this device in future?
You won’t get any official answer. But experience with MT so far is that they are doing anything possible to provide software upgrades way beyond EOL date. The only problem with 16MB flash devices is that ROS v7 is growing in size and they may have to drop support earlier than we (users) would like.
I will try to follow your instruction.
I already had some difficulties with restoring a backup from file when upgrading versions.
i’m going to create my custom installation script instead of using backup to change ip adresses, configure wifi’s, doh etc..
I believe when i finish with script it will be much more faster to restore config after netinstall.
My device is “LMT” branded router.
Im just curious how to remove all that lmt branding shit like images etc from flash, maybe it will help me to save some space ?
I believe they some factory image stored somewhere, since lmt image appears to be restored after netinstall, is it possible to save space with deleting these ?
With netinstall it was possible to upgrade to the latest - 7.16.1
But i cant upgrade via packages anymore - need to use netinstall and reconfigure the device after it.