Upgrade to 3.1 on 532A Now Non accesible

RouterOS General
1

I upgraded a RB 532a from 2.9.50 to 3.1 ( Did not upgrade to 3.0 first)
At the time of update the board had 1 ethernet port enabled, the other 2 were disabled. It had two XR 5 cards in there, one of the WLAN’s was disabled as well. This station had two radio’s to act as a repeater, but then network topology changed so the other radio was disabled and left like that.

At the time of upgrade the the 532A was in Station WDS mode, with a bridge. The update uploaded, and rebooted, but never came back on ( Never connected wirelessly to the AP) I went to the location, connected via a local AP 2.4Ghz which was connected to Ether 1. I ran Winbox, scanned for RB boards, none found. Tried entering the IP manually of the device before upgrade, no connection.

I then tried to power cycle the 532A and the local AP ( Other device) as well. Tried to connect to it again via the local AP. Nothing again, the RB 532 never responded to pings, or connections via winbox.

I tried to use one of the other boards that I had that could see that site, on the XR5 ( before the one site was connected via WLAN to this problem site) and so I tried to SCAN, or use the align tool in winbox and nothing found with that other station.

I read a thread where on a 532A the WLAN devices may switch from one to the other, eg WLAN 1 becomes WLAN2, and WLAN 2 become WLAN1. I would expect to see it at least from the other station since the WLAN 2 that was disabled was facing the other site that I tested from, it just had been diabled, and that site connected direct to the AP. I would of expected one radio to be on.

I upgraded another RB 532A locally at my office here, and it updated fine, no problems. The only differences were that this one had only 1 radio, and was in AP mode.

Any Ideas? The problem board is quite hard to get to physically, otherwise I would of already tried to see if the link light was on, and or connected via serial.

I upgraded two other RB 112’s one with a XR5 card, the other with a RB52H card, both in Station WDS with bridge, these upgraded fine, rebooted, and reconnected with no problems, but seemed to take a bit long, (10 minutes) then finnally reconnected.

Any help/ideas would be great.

2

One thing we noted sometimes was the following:
Upgrading systems with a bootloader (RouterBoot) lower than 2.8 did create the same symptom (systems don’t come up again after upgrade). Ensuring to have at least RouterBoot 2.8 installed BEFORE the upgrade seems to do the trick.

As this is just our observation: Can anyone from MikroTik perhaps confirm this?

3

Does not come up Again? Do you mean, will not? or would I have to bring it down and update it via serial? Is the board dead?

4

In the cases I know what helped was upgrading RouterBoot via the serial port and the net-installing the boards again.
After that: everything fine again :wink:

5

I have seen problems upgrading RB532R5 to 3.1 5 times now. The message that comes up after a failed install (every RB532 upgrade I have tried so far) is:

“Kernal Panic - Not Syncing: No Init found. Try passing init= option to kernal.”

I have seen the problem on bios 2.8 and 2.11

When I do a Net Install to upgrade I do not see the problem. I also managed to upgrade at least 1 RB532 (not R5) to 3RCx without problems (sorry I can’t remember the exact version).

When I do a Net Install from 2.48 to 3.1 my configuration is blown away even though I ask the unit to use the old configuration. Is this normal?

Thanks,
Ken

6

FYI

I just tried 3.2 and it had the same problem.

Ken

7

I had upgraded the two RB 532A’s. One crashed like that, and this other one is still up and running. I looked to see the firmware version, was 2.9 on this one. Unkown on the other one right now as its -25 and I don’t want to go outside and climb to get it. :slight_smile:

The one that is down was purchased about 4 months before the one that is still up.

8

Hi Mikrotik,

it´s time to add a warning to the release notes of 3.x.
Errors can happen, but not to warn Network admins
that an upgrade might kill there netwörk is not ok.
I´ve stations where I need to hire a climbing company
so a killed ap is no cheap fun and causes a lot of
angry customers.

Stefan

9

Its a very serious problem. We are effectively dead in the water regarding V3 until the 532 upgrade problem is fixed as we have so many 532s in the field.

We haven’t found problems upgrading anything else, just 532s so far…

George

10

Just to confirm the last post, They are not accessible, as in they cannot be fixed? I can understand that they had a upgrade problem, but my understanding is that they can be fixed via a netinstall. Am I correct in assuming this? I still have not had a chance to get my hardware. I will be doing that on Monday and will update this thread when I try and fix it via netinstall.

11

Yes they can be fixed with a Net Install. However the labour costs to getting a broken unit down fixed then back up a 300’ tower in a Canadian winter is rediculus. I suppose we should have tested them ourselves but I did about 10 RB133s and RB150s without problems before I nuked the RB532s. I didn’t even know they were RB532s until my climber told me.

Ken

12

Hmm… loading V3 on a RB112 and you think MT has issues?

You need to make sure the 532’s have 2.9.5 running on them before attempting the upgrade…

13

Only 2.9.5, or anything above 2.9.5? The units were all 2.9.48 with Boot Loader 2.11 that I upgraded and they still bombed.

Ken

14

2.9.5 or above. I did the same thing with radios running 2.9.46 and 2.9.48.

15

Seems to be some confusion here. Reading your post, it appears that you feel that a 112 is not suitable for V3, and that anything over 2.9.5 is a candidate for an upgrade to 3.x.

From where I sit, an RB112 is supported hardware and works just fine with V3.x, and despite the problem with the WLAN disappearing upgrade in the earlier RCs, upgrading a 112 works fine today.

Issues we have found with upgrades are limited to the 532 only, and, in addition, of course anything earlier than 2.9.38 is likely to be a license issue due to age of the license.

From our perspective, fix the 532 upgrade issue and RouterOS V3 is great. Please state your opinion clearly if you feel differently…

George

16

  1. I have found v3 works iffy at best on the RB112 platform. You have to uninstall most packages and use it only as a CPE device for it to work reliably.

  2. The RB532’s typically crash with the kernel crash if you don’t upgrade from 2.9.5+ to v3. In other words if you upgrade from 2.9.46 to v3 it will crash. Upgrade to 2.9.5x first then to v3 and you won’t have a problem.

17

we need to know exactly what configuration you had before upgrade. What wireless cards, the configuration of the wireless cards (country settings,band,frequency,etc)?
What bios and RouterOS version you had before upgrade?
What packages were enabled and what file used for upgrade?
What revision of the boards you had?

18

AHh Finnaly got the thing down!

I copied this from Hyperterminal when the device first booted up…


RouterBOOT booter 2.8

RouterBoard 532A

CPU frequency: 399 MHz
Memory size: 64 MB

Press any key within 2 seconds to enter setup..
loading kernel from nand… OK
setting up elf image… OK
jumping to kernel code
Kernel panic - not syncing: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel.


I then installed 3.2 right away via netinstall and its accesible now.

The configuration was as follows.
RB 532A that was running 2.9.50 then was upgraded to 3.1 ( Did not install 3.0 ever)
There was two Ubiquiti XR5 cards on this board.
At the time of upgrade, Ether 2, and Ether 3 were disabled. The wireless cad on the BACK side was disabled as well at the time of upgrade.

The 532A was configured as STATION wds, connected to an AP. ( upgrade was done over wireless) there was a bridge set up the way it is described in the Wiki for simple transparent bridge.
All other settigs were defaults that are set as defualts, other then using WPA, WPA2, and TKIP for security over the wireless.
Country was “Not Set”, Antenna was not set, etc, all defualts, TX power was Default.

The board only had NTP Server running. Firewall, Rules, Queus were not set.

This was a very simple install.

The paste above was when the board was powered back on when it was on the desk.

On a side note: WHen I was using netinstall, I noticed that you can have boot to NAND then Ethernet. Just wondering, if I had it set to that option could I have just run netinstall on the ethernet side of the baord and would it of booted up? I noticed you had to hit enter a couple of times when it was booting to ether when I did it manually ( I think can’t recall)

ANythign else you need to know?

ADDED: The link was in 5 Ghz Turbomode as well.

19

We suffered the exact problem, but with upgrading to v2.9.48 from v2.9.46. It took down the whole network, about 170 systems. Boards used were 112, 511, 532, 133. Had to connect to serial, boot of ether1 and do netinstall to repair. I have also checked and found that even systems (not every one though…?!) with bootloader 2.8 and above at times did not upgrade and the result : Kernel panic - not syncing: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel.

It cost us lots of money to visit each client and high site and repair the damage.

Lesson: wait a few months before upgrading anything!!

20

Never never change a running system.
And never ever believe that a vendor warns about problems with his product.
Even now that there are multiple messages describing the same problem
there is no single line of warning in the release notes. So any customer
who do not follow this forum runs straight into this problem.

So please MT put a single line in the 3.x release notes:
“Warning: There are reported problems upgrading 1xx/5xx-Boards from Version 2.x to this
release. You may have to get physical access to the device and do a netinstall. We’re fixing this in the release 3.3.”

Think about the poor admins who have to handle such a bad situation.

Stefan