{"id":436,"date":"2014-10-31T11:00:26","date_gmt":"2014-10-31T19:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jacksontech.net\/?p=436"},"modified":"2014-10-31T13:44:10","modified_gmt":"2014-10-31T21:44:10","slug":"microtik-routerboard-411-openwrt-update","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jacksontech.net\/index.php\/2014\/10\/microtik-routerboard-411-openwrt-update\/","title":{"rendered":"MicroTik Routerboard 411 + OpenWRT: Update"},"content":{"rendered":"

The ailing Routerboard 411 in one of my previous posts<\/a> has been sitting in a plastic tub under my bed awaiting replacement capacitors, a sudden level-up in my soldering ability, and a dramatic increase in my level of confidence in not destroying things by jabbing at them with a giant heating element. I still have none of the three; however, one of my friends donated his time and effort and replaced the four dead capacitors for me. (Thanks, Will! I owe you a gift card.)<\/p>\n

Now that the capacitors have been replaced, I’ve put OpenWRT on the device for good. The instructions here<\/a> are dubious. I did things the manual way according to this blog post<\/a>, starting from the point after I had booted into OpenWRT’s ramdisk image as detailed in my previous post<\/a> about this router.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

First, I formatted the NAND flash partitions. You can do that from the bootloader or via the following commands from within the ramdisk image:<\/p>\n

mtd erase kernel\r\nmtd erase rootfs<\/pre>\n
You can also view the current partition layout using the following command:<\/p>\n
cat \/proc\/mtd<\/pre>\n
Note down the rootfs and kernel partitions.<\/p>\n
Next, I copied the OpenWRT kernel (openwrt-ar71xx-mikrotik-vmlinux.elf) and rootfs (openwrt-ar71xx-mikrotik-Ath5k-rootfs.tar.gz) to the router. You could use scp for this, or wget the files from a webserver. On the router:<\/p>\n
scp user@yourhost:path\/to\/openwrt-ar71xx-mikrotik-vmlinux.elf \/tmp\r\nscp user@yourhost:path\/to\/openwrt-ar71xx-mikrotik-Ath5k-rootfs.tar.gz \/tmp<\/pre>\n
Then, mount the rootfs and kernel partitions using the partition layout you observed. (Yes, these are the partitions you just erased. It works. It’s automagical!)<\/p>\n
mkdir \/mnt\/kernel \r\nmkdir \/mnt\/rootfs\r\nmount -t yaffs2 \/dev\/mtdblock5 \/mnt\/kernel\r\nmount -t yaffs2 \/dev\/mtdblock6 \/mnt\/rootfs<\/pre>\n
Finally, copy and extract the files to their new homes.<\/p>\n
mv \/tmp\/openwrt-ar71xx-mikrotik-vmlinux.elf \/mnt\/kernel\/kernel\r\nchmod +x \/mnt\/kernel\/kernel\r\ncd \/mnt\/rootfs\r\ntar -xzf \/tmp\/openwrt-ar71xx-mikrotik-Ath5k-rootfs.tar.gz\r\n\r\ncd \/\r\numount \/mnt\/kernel\r\numount \/mnt\/rootfs\r\n<\/pre>\n
Reboot the board. You should have life at 192.168.1.1 after things settle down. Don’t forget to reconfigure the bootloader if necessary to boot from NAND instead of from the network.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The ailing Routerboard 411 in one of my previous posts has been sitting in a plastic tub under my bed awaiting replacement capacitors, a sudden level-up in my soldering ability, and a dramatic increase in my level of confidence in not destroying things by jabbing at them with a giant heating element. I still have … more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,5,3,9],"tags":[36,39,38,35,37],"class_list":["post-436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comptech","category-linux","category-networking","category-projects","tag-mikrotik","tag-openwrt","tag-rb411","tag-router","tag-routerboard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jacksontech.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jacksontech.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jacksontech.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jacksontech.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jacksontech.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=436"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/jacksontech.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/436\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":440,"href":"https:\/\/jacksontech.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/436\/revisions\/440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jacksontech.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jacksontech.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jacksontech.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}