I love the rb951g-2hnd. I’ve been using 2 units for testing for 6 months now and they have worked well. We are overwriting routerOS with openWRT and our firmware. I know you don’t support openWRT here, but please bare with me. We bought 20 units off you recently and intend to buy many more in the future.
After overwriting openWRT on new batch they get a bootloop after rebooting. The loop is not infinite, its always in the range of 1 to about 8 reboots and differs each time. So all lights go green, you hear a beep, and this repeats a bunch of time till it eventually boots up. Once its running it works great.
I looked at routerboot changelog and noticed that after 3.09 you expect the version of routerOS to be 5.26 or above and if not you reboot. Could this be the issue?
If so the fix would be to either:
Downgrade to 3.08 routerBoot
Somehow trick routerBoot into thinking openWRT is routerOS 5.26 or above
Please could you tell me how to do one of them. I assume downgrading is the best option. If so I’ve also got some routers with openWRT now, is there anyway to do a downgrade bootloader without having RouterOS on the unit? Can I just flash the mtd0 partition with the correct bootloader file i.e. ar9344-3.08.fwf.
Also I don’t understand how the bootloader can be on NAND, what happens if the NAND gets corrupt, since you’re can’t be using yaffs2 to store the bootloader how on earth does the router recover?
Please don’t tell me not to use OpenWRT we have built some very advanced software round it and we can’t change now. We think the RB951G-2HND is a great platform and intend on buying many units in the future.
This is a question only MikroTik can answer, but this is a user forum.
It could be possible that this change in the bootloader causes your reboots, but I have good news, the RouterBOOT 3.17 has a new fix that undoes that change from 3.09
Email support to get a testing version.
I upgraded to 3.17 but not when I boot normally(i.e. do NOT press reset) neither RouterOS or OpenWRT boot. All the LEDs are off and the router is unresponsive. The only way to get it to run is to either:
Hold down reset and ethernet boot an OS
Hold reset till the lights come on then let go and firmware seems to load as normal
Please DomeMaster, keep us updated on your finding. We also bought two RB951G-2HND for a project using OpenWRT. One router is running OpenWrt flawlessly and the other one is running it only in failsafe mode.
We are looking for a router running OpenWRT and the RB951G-2HND seems a good choice, we would like to continue our project with theses devices and recommend them to our partner as well.
I’ve been running openwrt on the RB951G-2HND boards for many months now and have probably a few hundred out in the field working perfectly. However our latest batch of boards failed to flash through PXE. We’re also seeing a bootloop now and after soldering down to the UART we’re seeing the the image loading via tftp but then about when the network interfaces come up it reboots itself. I was able to get openwrt installed once but we’re still seeing a bootloop. Image wise we’re using the same exact image for the netinstall that we’ve been using for months without fail, which seems to point to something changing with the bootloader.
I’ve been looking for solutions and would love to hear any one elses expereinces and if anyone has any ideas/solutions. I haven’t tried to downgrade the boards first but that will be our next test.
Two RB951G-2HnD with firmware (bootloader) 3.08 : OpenWrt works fine on them
One RB951G-2HnD with firmware (bootloader) 3.16 : Not able to run OpenWrt on it
From preceding post in this forum it seems that test version of 3.17 firmware does not solve the problem. I would like to downgrade the booloader to version 3.08 but cannot find it anywhere. Where I can find it? How to apply it on the router (Winbox?) ?
thanks god to find you talking about this issue here. 4 days tracking some way to make openwrt works.
my experience is that 3.14 works, after update it to 3.16 i bricked it. but today few minutes before finding you here i discovered that when i keep reset buton pressed i can boot the correct image, by accident, was goign to try netinstall again but forgot to swap cable to port1 and “boom” start ping on 192.168.1.1.
I would also like to confirm that 3.08 works perfectly. Luckly the batch of RB951G-2hnd we have are preloaded with 3.10 in current and 3.08 in the upgrade so fixing is simple .
im really happy to help you people, think that would be good if the first post were edited to include the situation, so people dont need to read all the topic to get the answer. (giving the credits for my ego)
So while the solution here does work, our company purchased a new batch of 100+ rb951g-2hnd and found that this batch now has a new mac (old ones were D4:CA:6D:::*) address prefix and downgrading to 3.08 bricks the device and will only boot using the backup bootloader. We’ve tried 3.10, and the latest 3.18 bootloaders (and a few inbetween) and all fail to allow openwrt installation other then 3.08.
These new devices with the mac address prefix: 4C:5E:0C:::* do not downgrade to 3.08. When we contacted mikrotiks support email their response was
Hello,
bootloader on device should never be downgraded to version that is older than one
with which router comes from factory. In this case I would simply say that newer
this model units simply do not support older bootloader version any more.
In my personal experience manufacturers should not ship the exact same model and version of a device that breaks backwards compatibility. If mikrotik wants to upgrade something like that which breaks backwards compatibility at least put a version number on it (RB951G-2HnD v1) so we know NOT to buy 1000 of these devices in bulk.
If anyone in the community knows a trick or a path for a proper downgrade I’d be really thankful for any help/hints.
Sorry for late delay, I haven’t visted this site in a while. The original problem was solved by upgrading to latest to OpenWRT. I’ve also found the same issue with “4C:5E:0C” MAC versions. Its infuriating as we’ve just bought 200 units.
Have you figured out how to get OpenWRT on it?
What’s worse is I asked MikroTik about versioning and they just said they couldn’t confirm. I really hope they didn’t know in advance that it wouldn’t work and purposefully were vague so I’d still buy them.
Either way I’m up shit creek as I need to flash these units ASAP. Any help would be much appreciated, if I figure it out I’ll post back here.
Thanks for the speedy repose, I’ll try 3.08 in 20 mins. However 0xexception mentioned that the new batch doesn’t work.
So while the solution here does work, our company purchased a new batch of 100+ rb951g-2hnd and found that this batch now has a new mac (old ones were D4:CA:6D:::*) address prefix and downgrading to 3.08 bricks the device and will only boot using the backup bootloader. We’ve tried 3.10, and the latest 3.18 bootloaders (and a few inbetween) and all fail to allow openwrt installation other then 3.08.
These new devices with the mac address prefix: 4C:5E:0C:::* do not downgrade to 3.08.
I can confirm that bootloader 3.8 bricks the new rb951g-2hnd. Also 3.19 does not help the situation, I still can’t even load the initramd openwrt. Well it loads but I can’t ping it or request IP from it.
Hi, I installed openwrt on RB951g-2hnd and I want to upgrade firmware. But sysupgrade doesn’t work for mikrotik device. I have to boot from initramfs to be able to rewrite partitions data (rootfs + kernel). I have serial access to uart, but unfortunately there’re no bios options. The only option I see is install routerOs, change boot device and go on. But here’s a tricky part I have changed boot protocol to bootp and netinstall doesn’t see my router now ( just before this operation netinstall found routerboard perfectly) Is there anything I can do from openwrt to change boot device or upgrade system in another way? Thanks in advance!
You have access to uart from openwrt?
How exactly you are looking for bios options?
Where did you find “install routerOs, change boot device”? Could you make please screenshot with this options?
How did you changed boot protocol to bootp ?
I am also have issue with from where boot device.
try revert your changes or describe your experience you described higher please.
I make some investigation around:
My wrong boot log from reset procedure ( pressed reset button): http://pastebin.com/arQJc2uk
where
[ 0.000000] Kernel command line: GPIO_RESET=yes no-uart boot_part_size=4194304 gpio=216619 HZ=300000000 mem=128M kmac=D4:CA:6D:AA:E8:28 board=951G boot=0 mlc=3 console=ttyS0,115200 rootfstype=yaffs noinitrd
boot=0 mlc=3 ( absent parts=1 but present GPIO_RESET=yes and another value of gpio=216619)
.
