RB493G Bricked after upgrade to 5.22

Hardware MikroTik hardware general
1

We are very conservative when it comes to upgrading from one version of RouterOS to another.

After seeing how well the RB2011s that have 5.22 installed at the factory work, we decided to roll it out.

First we upgraded all the 1100’s and 600’s. No problems. The first 2011’s that didn’t have 5.22 ex factory were upgraded next. Again no problems.

Then we started the process of upgrading the 435G’s.

Literally every second one we upgrade is bricked and needs to be netinstalled back to 5.20

Does anyone have any ideas as to what the problem could be?

Is it faulty hardware?

Is it something with 5.22?

Could I have purchased conterfeit routerboards? We have one distributor who supplied us counterfeit Nanobridges that bricked themselves when we upgraded to AirOs 5.5.2 If they can source fake Nanobridges and sell them as the real thing, chances are, they can do the same with Routerboards.

2

Deleted because not related.

3

Before upgrading ROS firmware, be sure to check for boot loader updates, and apply those too; e.g.:

[admin@Mikrotik] /system routerboard> print
       routerboard: yes
             model: 411
     serial-number: 167B01CA0E14
  current-firmware: 2.39
  upgrade-firmware: 2.41

[admin@Mikrotik] /system routerboard> upgrade
Do you really want to upgrade firmware? [y/n] 
y
firmware upgraded successfully, please reboot for changes to take effect!

[admin@Mikrotik] /system routerboard> .. reb   
Reboot, yes? [y/N]: 
y
system will reboot shortly

I suspect that, around the 5.20-5.22 time frame, the packaging of ROS firmware for certain architectures changed in a way that earlier boot loaders don’t handle properly. So if you fail to update the boot loader before trying to upgrade ROS across this threshold, the boot will fail and you will need to use netinstall.

4

It can’t be a bootloader issue. I religiously upgrade the bootloaders to the latest version immediately after upgrading the firmware.

5

just a thought: did you upgrade to 5.21 before upgrading to 5.22, or did you go directly from 5.20 to 5.22? If there were bootloader changes in 5.21 that are needed to boot 5.22, skipping over it would be a problem.

6

We have never installed 5.21 on any of our devices. Ever.

All the machines that were updated were updated from 5.20

It’s only the RB493Gs that crash. The bootloader is 4.21 on those. It’s 4.21 on 5.20 remains 4.21 after upgrading to 5.22
Capture.JPG

7

I have also problem with instaling 5.22. Console output - see image. Before with ROS 5.11 running perfectly
493.jpg

8

I recommend running Netinstall to format and reinstll the OS.

9

OK, I’ve done that on these two. It’s not always easy to get to these sites.

Have a look here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bfnTPLbVnA

That walk wasn’t this morning, but once I was up there this morning, I had to dissasemble a network cabinet to get to the unit. Meanwhile I had a lot of people screaming about their internet.

Let’s assume that the units aren’t counterfeit.

What is the reason why this is happening with 5.22?
How do I stop this from happening again?

I have over 400 RBs in the field. I can’t have this issue with more than 200 of them -which is the 50% failure rate we are experiencing at the moment.

10

HDeleted because not related.

11

Dobby,

I don’t know what your customers are like, but our customers pay a lot of money for good connectivity. The result is, when it’s not working they get on the phone and abuse our poor support technicians.

We cannot have even one more router fail during an upgrade. The delay between when the router fails and the time it takes us to cover the up to 200km to get to some of the customer sites is just too long.

So let’s wait for the support staff at MikroTik to come up with a viable answer to my problem.