@patrikg
We have now two reports, one by arandomadmin and one by lucaberta about the same port not being used for the two phases of the netinstall.
The first part is initiated by the device and it puts the "boot port" in listening mode, so that it can boot to the netinstall payload.
Then the booted first part tries to communicate to the running netinstall (or the netinstall tries to communicate with the device, doesn't matter).
On newish devices the port used for boot is ether1 and the port used for netinstall communication is also ether1 and everything goes smooth (if firewall on the PC, etc. are set correctly).
On some older devices the boot port is not ether1, on the RB1100AH it is port ether13, BUT the port to connect to for the second part is still ether1.
On the CCR1016 (which has only SFP and SFP+ cages) the boot port is SFP12, BUT the port to connect for the second part is - found by experiment - the first SFP port (which is a SFP+ port).
I presume that the (wrong) mechanism is the same, the netinstall is somehow hardcoded to use (for the second part) the first port (which is usually ether1)
Older versions of netinstall probably work correctly using only the boot port.
well, I ended up discarding the router, after saving the 2 power supplies and fans!
no, you understood me right. Truth be told, on a router which only has SFP ports, one would expect that youād need an SFP or a DAC cable in order to perform the netboot and netinstall, but that was NOT the issue.
The issue was twofold:
the first phase of the netinstall would be done from the last SFP port on the router
the second phase would, OTOH, be done on the FIRST port of the router, which happens to be an SFP+ port, not just an SFP port. And of course an SFP+ port accepts only SFP+ adapters, and that is why I used a 10G S+RJ10 SFP+ connected to a 1G switch (luckily the S+RJ10 SFP+ negotiates also 1G speeds)
So not only I would need two SFP adapters, but one would need to be an SFP+ on the first port, and the other a standard SFP on the last port.
well, this router is quite old and discontinued, so I would not expect MikroTik to do anything about this.
I have written this post and am documenting every one of the steps taken such that if other users would have similar situations, they might find this information useful.
not at all. The formatting done during the netinstall-cli step, which I was monitoring on the serial console, was always flawless.
I have repartioned the NAND from the bootloader and formatted it there a number of times, but I would still get the pesky āCould not mount ubifs/yaffs filesystem: No such deviceā error, so I decided to discard the old router, and saved the power supplies and fans as spares.
A very good learning experience indeed for me, I was happy to see good feedback from many of you, hence my thanks.
Adding to this last remark of yours, I just wanted to add that I have used the latest 7.20.1 firmware only to do these final tests, as I had found out from other messages on this forum that the āCould not mount ubifs/yaffs filesystem: No such deviceā error might have been found in older version of the bootloader, so I decided to go straight to the latest version of the code and firmware.
Once again, I uploaded the FWF file to the router via the serial console using Xmodem, and did all the repartioning and formatting of the NAND using the new firmware.
At this point I have used all the cards I could, and given the error I was getting, it was time to trash the device, sadly. I really hate to throw away devices!
If I were you I would still try doing a new netinstall with an older version of both the netinstall and RouterOS, the 7.20.1 is (IMHO) too new (and still full of little or large bugs) to be meaningful.
Actually I would try netinstalling the factory version first thing, as that is the only version that surely works.
I need to have my routers on the latest code, and I am not willing to have an active router which I cannot trust as after a reboot, as an error about the file system might pop upā¦
That is why I decommissioned the router and scavenged it for spare parts.
