GrooveA 52ac restore problems

DanielAJDD · December 2, 2023, 12:29pm

Hi folks. I’ve got a GrooveA 52ac that I had been successfully been using as an access point (connected to an LHGG LTE6 kit). Water got into it, and I had to replace the Groove.

I’m having trouble applying the backups I made from the old device to the replacement. I’m connecting to the Groove via a laptop plugged into the other end of the Groove’s ethernet cable.

I’ve installed the same firmware version (7.11.2), and then I upload a backup from the old device to the new device, select restore in WebFig, and the device reboots. When it does, I do not see the expected SSID advertised, and my laptop gets an IP of 169.254.44.something instead of the expected 192.168.88.254. If I do a factory reset I can start again, but by that point I’ve lost all the logs so I can’t debug further.

Any ideas how I can debug this, or under what circumstances I’d get an IP in the 169.254 range? I’ve got a very vague recollection that I might have disabled the Groove’s DHCP server, but that wouldn’t explain why it never gets as far as broadcasting its SSID, so I’m thinking it has a problem applying the backup and just stops working.

mkx · December 2, 2023, 2:42pm

Is the replacement device exactly the same type as was the dead one?

Binary backups (backup/redtore type) are intended for exactly same device and work with same type (some device specific stuff is in backups, e.g. MAC addresses … these are not vital if original device doesn’t appear working in same networks). But restoring binary backups on a different device type (even if it’s similar, e.g. groove vs. groove ac) is not supported … restore does finish but it has tendency to leave device in slightly undefined state.

DanielAJDD · December 3, 2023, 9:12am

Thanks! I think it’s the same device, but of course it could have changed ‘under the hood’ since the first and second one that I bought.

Annoyingly I had been tempted to use the open source Terraform provider to configure my devices as I’ve done a lot of IaC in my professional life, but I thought I’d do it the ‘easy’ way instead… More fool me!