Well, I want to share my frustration, that there are two a little different versions of this geat device. (951g-2HnD}
I made OpenWRT image and tested it to death until I purchased more pieces for producion, well, it took some time .
Now my image does ot work and even new patch to support newer, chaned version, is not available..
This is pretty normal with chinesse routers, but I did not expect so from Mikrotik.
Just be warned, if You want to use OpenWRT,see https://dev.openwrt.org/ticket/18433
Just curious: what is the point of using OpenWRT on Mikrotik devices? From my experience (not huge and non-professional though) what Mikrotik routers can do is thanks to their RouterOS. At the same time, hardware components they use are not something unique to the market (e.g. other brands use same CPUs/auxiliary chips/memory) and in terms of numbers in tech specs they are rarely winners. Of course, in functions/price ratio they are among leaders, but this is also due to RouterOS built-in.
So, what are your goals and what functions you have in OpenWRT that RouterOS lacks?
Well, not much related to topic but trying to answer simply, OpenWRT is “just opensource”, allowing me to compile sources and perhaps read exactly what they do.. Well of course soures are huge enouh to be impossible to read or understand them all, but “a binary” is still just much different thing.
To say the truth, openVPN by Mikrotik was incomatible with other devices, as far as I have seen when attempted. And I am using cron. And some NFS file sharing.. And played with some traffic shaping. But the most imortant for me is the way how i can setup things.. No matter if they work equally if set in RouterOS.
As for devices, IMHO they are very competitive, if not best, especially for soho where we play cheap.. Show me another 128MB ram+128MB nand and cpu capable enough, for 50 euro. :}.. 951g is very good hit here. Well rb2011 with sfp (but it is otherwise the same as 951g) or CRS109, are likely perfect too.
But my post was not about any problem with routeros, neither devices. Just a surprise that I did buy the same device, and it is different.
I hope Mikrotik will not suffer any looses from my deletng routeros from that devices - i paid the same money.. I just do not like an idea of Metarouter. That is personal opinion, I have no better explanation here.
In fact, i would expect some help from them and they may sell few routers more.
Did you even read the ticket that you linked us to? Somebody figured it out and developed a patch for the problem almost 2 months ago.
Issue is out of MikroTik’s hands…the CPU/SoC was revised by Qualcomm/Atheros, requiring this change. The change appears to be backwards-compatible with the older revision of the SoC.
– Nathan
P.S. – I have no idea what the MikroTik support person quoted in that ticket was talking about. As far as I can tell, there is no “change in kernel offset” in newer versions of RouterBOOT. I have booted old Kamikaze images on the most recent versions without problem, and it is clear from the ticket that OpenWRT was actually booting up just fine…the problem was with the initialization of the SoC’s ethernet interface.
nathan, sorry for posting a bit misleading ticket link. Yes it seems to boot.
But the response on that linked ticket nicely explains situation from human part of sight, that hurt me - about support from Mikrotik.
Well, I am still trying to make it work without success.. I can boot rb2011UiAS and use 100Mbit part, but gigabit switch is still malfunct, and I cant access rb951 after boot probbably because it has only gigabit one. It is not unable to boot, ok.. but does it make a difference?
well, i am finaly up and running on rb951g, using last attempt that compiled overnight.
I do not know why I did not succeed before.. Never mind.. But it is a whole new trunk version..
No, I think you linked to the correct ticket. It is just confusing to me that you said there was no fix when there was one. I think what you may not have understood from the ticket is that the fix was not yet applied to OpenWRT trunk, so you had to manually download and apply the patch yourself to your own buildroot before you compile.
Yes, it is a bit disappointing that MikroTik can sometimes be terse and unhelpful, even with their own software…sometimes I wonder if they are understaffed both on the support and on the development side. (I keep telling MikroTik I would be willing to pay them for a premium support contract, and I am sure I’m not the only one! They used to have such a program several years ago, but discontinued it in favor of pointing people at trained and certified MikroTik consultants. But I don’t want to pay a consultant…consultants can’t fix bugs in MikroTik’s software. What I want is to pay MikroTik to get my bug reports bumped to the front of the line and get priority.)
At the same time, though, I can understand their policy on helping with OpenWRT development: it is not reasonable for people to expect them to put the same kind of effort into supporting third-party software as they put into supporting their own software. Their own software comes first, as it should. Still, it would be nice if, rather than completely shutting down the conversation when you ask for technical details about the hardware and bootloader, they would instead respond to those questions on an “as time permits” basis, rather than “we refuse to talk to you about this.”
For us “old-timers” it is probably even more frustrating to get non-answers to certain questions because back in the days when MikroTik was just starting to get into custom non-x86 hardware (the RB500 era), MikroTik was VERY open about how to run third-party operating systems on their RouterBoards…they even went into great detail about it in the manual for the hardware! (See pages 8 and 9 in the RB500 manual.) There are things in that manual that still apply today to modern RouterBoards, but which are not published anywhere else; for example, without the RB500 manual, I would not have known about the “kernparm” ELF section. How times have changed.
That is very interesting because as I said earlier, I still don’t think the fix for the gigabit ports on AR9344 rev 3 CPUs has been checked into trunk yet. (If you read the thread about this very issue on the openwork-devel mailing list, you will find that people with newer RB2011 boards had the same problem as you: couldn’t do anything with the gigabit ports, but the 100M ports worked fine.) Are you sure that the 951G you are testing with is from a new batch, with the new MAC address OUI?
– Nathan
Nathan, i put that patch into source files manualy. As I did before when it did ot work.. Even played with various pll_1000 values.
Well, but recently I checked and build something else, svn -r xxx and now It says Firmware Version OpenWrt Chaos Calmer r44399 / LuCI Master (git-15.041.27918-86c6272) Kernel Version 3.14.32
I am not that experienced in various versions.i just wanted to use, what I aready had.