I have been trying to upgrade the firmware in our LHG-60G radios and running into an issue with available memory. I have uninstalled most packages to create more room but that will not be nearly enough. Currently, it is running 6.42 (OLD) and I am trying to upgrade to a current V6 or V7 long-term firmware. The issue is the radio memory only has 15MB available and the RouterOS is over 12MB by itself without additional packages like Wireless or Security. I am unable to load any new firmware since the current OS is over 12MB and any new OS is over 12MB (12+12=24>15). Do I have to completely remove the previous OS and Netinstall every radio just to upgrade them, I sure hope that isn’t the solution here? What is the easiest way to upgrade the firmware remotely for these radios given this memory limitation?
Thank you for your post. I am having the same exact issue, isn’t that ironic? I do not feel like Netinstall is the solution here to physically update every single radio. Mikrotik has not seemed to provide any response on this issue to help resolve their radio memory issue preventing it from being updated properly. I guess until I get help from Mikrotik, I will start removing them and replacing with another vendors product that can be updated and much easier! Please message me if you would like to purchase some LHG-60G dishes at a great price(new and used)?
Your LHG 60G has more than 64MB RAM, which means its “root” of storage (as you can see it) is on RAM disk. Just don’t upload upgrade npks to flash/ subdir, they belong to root (and that’s where ROS upgrader expects to find them).
Did you actually try to upgrade ROS (and failed … and if so, what did log say immediately after?) or are you simply asking for a hand?
Thank you for your response. I uploaded the RouterOS NPK file into the files tab on the radio and it failed every time. I tried V6 and V7 current stable versions. The radio says in files that it has 15.3 MiB available and 12.5 MiB is currently being used by the running OS. The radio has a total memory of 240 MiB. When I tried the update, the logs says it failed due to not enough available memory. The new RouterOS NPK’s are about 12.3 MiB alone. If I am not supposed to load the upgrade files into the flash/subdir, how do I properly load them into root? I have only updated them thru the files tab and have never ran into this issue before.
Thank you for your response. I uploaded the RouterOS NPK file into the files tab on the radio and it failed every time. I tried V6 and V7 current stable versions. The radio says in files that it has 15.3 MiB available and 12.5 MiB is currently being used by the running OS. The radio has a total memory of 240 MiB. When I tried the update, the logs says it failed due to not enough available memory. The new RouterOS NPK’s are about 12.3 MiB alone. If I am not supposed to load the upgrade files into the flash/subdir, how do I properly load them into root? I have only updated them thru the files tab and have never ran into this issue before.
The log entry is more likely about updater checking free space and finding out that it isn’t sufficient. If there are any fikes under flash/ directory, you can possibly remove them (but come back and ask if they are safe to remove beforehand).
Excessive config (e.g. bigger address lists or bigger static DHCP leases) can take up quite some of permanent storage as well. You may have to reduce config size …
Yes, ARM devices with 16MB flash are pain in the …
You are probably right about the updater unable to find free space, although the radio does have about 50 MiB available in total free space.
I do not have any fikes under the flash/directory.
The radio configuration is very simple and basic. I just have an IP address/vlan on a smaller subnet. No DHCP and I have only 20 items on the address-list. I might be able to remove 3 items from the address-list but that would be it.
I can try to see if the FTP method will allow it to be uploaded into root. I have not tried that method yet and it seems like that might be the only option here reading the Wiki. Any other thoughts?
It might be, that netinstall will be necessary … yeah, I’d hate it too, but sometimes there’s some hidden trash which can only be cleaned using netinstall … and after that, drvice is healthy and ready for series of normal upgrades.
This is a lot of Mikrotik radios that I would have to physically upgrade like this. This applies to every Mikrotik LHG60 dish that we have. Some that do not even have the address-list info on it as well with some basic configurations. That seems like a tremendous amount of work to physically go to each radio in the field to either FTP or Netinstall the OS on. Not to mention the downtime the customers would experience doing this on every dish including a lot on customer premises radios which I would have issues doing at night. If that is what I have to do just to get the radio to be updated, I feel that I should just put up another vendors dish that I don’t have issues upgrading like this. I do not have this issue with any other vendor radios!
I will say that I have upgraded a lot of Mikrotik equipment and have not had any update problems except for all of the LHG60 dishes. They seem very very problematic/restrictive in this aspect. I would hope you are correct that having to Netinstall the OS back on a radio would resolve the issue, however, LHG60 radios that still have plenty of RAM space all have the same issue with not enough space in flash/directory. With that being the problem, I feel like the issue would repeat itself and I would be forced to physically FTP or Netinstall a new OS every time I wanted to upgrade it.
Almost seems like I need to manually increase the size of the Flash/directory so that it can hold more capacity for an update to be processed. That way remote updates could be feasible again. Does that sound correct to you?
No. I’m pretty sure that flash disk is at its maximum (15.something MB) and is used for installed ROS image plus config. And then there’s RAM which can hold upliaded npks for installer to grab them. It doesn’t matter how much RAM is available, if ROS installed image plus config can’t fit on those 15.something MB of flash, then normal upgrade won’t be possible. It seems that configuration is internally stored as some kind of binary blob and that can have two detrimential effects (sometimes reported on this forum): 1) device behaviour doesn’t conform to apparent config and only resetting config to empty/factory default restores device to “sanity” … and 2) it contains some config not used any more but does take up flash space (it seems that upgrading to v7 keeps a copy of v6 config intact in case user downgrades to v6).
Another thing is the way packages are bundled in v6 … base bundle contains a few packages and not all are needed in some use cases. One example is routing package, if your LHG-60G are used in switch/PtMP manner, then routing package is not necessary. In v6 it’s possible to “unbundle” installation and by ommiting unneeded packages it’s possible to reduce storage footprint. However, this then makes upgrading to v7 much harder (netinstall is probably required). OTOH you may have some optional (but unneeded) packages already installed.
As I said, there are options, but they really depend on current config and wanted end state … you never gave out any details about your devices state. So I’ll stop guessing. If you decide to come forward with full details, then I may continue with discussion though.
I have been going thru the packages and trying to uninstall any unneeded packages in the radio to free some room. Current ROS is 6.43.4 in the LHG60 with packages (Advanced tools, multicast,routing,security,system,wireless). I have uninstalled all of the other packages and it did not seem to make a difference as far as upgrading normally. With those packages 11.1 MiB of 15.3 MiB are being used. Total memory is 240 MiB and free memory is 205 MiB, total HDD space is 15.3 MiB and free HDD space is 4296 KiB. Since ROS is about 12.3 MiB by itself without packages, normal upgrade does not seem possible.
I do have a firewall and address-list for access, but the rest is a very basic bridge wireless PTP link. What other questions do you have or information that you might need regarding the device state?
As far as end state, I would like to upgrade the radios remotely instead of physically having to be present for Netinstall/FTP. I would prefer V7 over V6 ROS, but just getting the OS current is more important.
How exactly are you trying to upgrade ROS and what exactly does log say after it fails to upgrade? How exactly are you uploading the npk files?
And: can you post output of command
/system package print
ROS will upgrade itself over the old installation, so normally it succeeds even if flash is almost full … it may need a bit more space if the newer ROS image is slightl bigger than the previous one. My experience with hAP ac2 (15.3MB flash, it came with 6.42.3 installed from factory) is that upgrade of ROS even when flash had only 1.5MB free was just fine.
I did find that when I was able to uninstall the dhcp, security and routing. I was able to gain enough flash for the upgrade to go through. The flash needed at least 4-5 MiB available for the upgrade to be processed. I only loaded in the Wireless and ROS 7.16 which has 14.5 MiB of 16.0 MiB used now.
So, moving forward. I will unistall more of the older packages to free up more space in flash for the upgrade to be processed. I have now successfully upgraded a wAP3 and LHG-60 using this method.