[Commotion-discuss] CW Firmware on a Ubiquiti Picostation M2HP

[Nicolas North]

Hi there everyone!

I'm very sorry for the really late reply but I've been a little held back lately by all of the difficulties I've encountered while starting this project that I really believe in, so I've been working on it on my own for a few weeks to see what I could figure out. Key updates are as follows:

I've found a way to "unlock" / "unbrick" ubiquiti picostations and bullets and have been able to do so several times. For now my experience has always been: unbox them, try installing commotion firmware immediately from the web interface as per the instructions, device installs and reboots, seemingly gets stuck in limbo [no bootloop but not showing up in any network scan with or without dhcp under any subnet], enter tftp, try reinstalling AirOS, device reboots into endless bootloop, enter tftp again to flash cw firmware only to get 512 firmware check error. The solution for me has consistently been to install unifi on the devices as per ubiquiti instructions [a procedure that is unsupported but explained on their website] via tftp [I can provide the link if anyone is interested] [always got them working on unifi like this btw], then enter tftp again and install AirOS 5.1.2, and only then was I always able to actually install cw firmware via AirOS web interface and working as instructed in the cw howtos. The devices reboot perfectly and fully functionally in cw and except for my first attempt [see last mail] where I had problems with LuCI, I was always able to do the initial setup perfectly. The major problem here which had been haunting my dreams [irony, but true] for the last few weeks is that upon the first reboot the devices completely loose their mesh and WiFi configs and they seem to be missing key packages suck as olsr and such. A possible explanation for this is that after the cw install only 2% of space is left on the device's NAND for some reason I have yet to understand. A quick df -h via ssh reveals the partitions all together make up less than 50MB although this also appears to be the case with stock AirOS and Unifi at least on my devices.

I've been searching everywhere for a solution to this problem and I've found that the standard openwrt image is 50MB but being these always bin files I've never been able to expand their partitions before flashing them.

I've also tried installing stock owrt following metamesh's directives from a link in the last email but although I could install it [through the super complex procedure listed above] on both devices I still got 98% of storage space used and couldn't get all packages installed as per their tutorial!

I really don't understand how this is happening given that except from the possible firmware locks introduced recently I'm basically getting extremely common deviceS in the mesh world and installing cw or even stock openwrt onto them. I'd really like to know what I'm doing wrong. I've seen your new thread about this ubiquiti issue but I don't understand how I could even try using other routers on the cw download page if they're not weather proof. Apart from the fact of course that I risk getting even more devices that will end up bricked or not fully functional after all of the money I've already spent. Should I try with unifi AC AP pros? Are they supported by cw?

I really want and need to start this project. It'll be a very profound achievement I think and there are already tens of people with more every day asking me when it'll be online and I cannot accept that it's not working or even worse that I'm so close such as having it only work until a reboot or a power loss related hard reboot.

I will happily reward any dev or specialist at cw or in this community with a 100€ bounty / donation if this can help [all I can afford right now] that will be able to help me get online by any mean in a timely fashion and in a cost effective way, with more small donations to the project every month in the future from the tip jar we'll establish here on location.

This has to happen now :)

Thanks in advance and truly sincere kudos for the amazing work on this fantastic project. I really appreciate all of your help on this as well of course and I definitely look forward to working with you.

Thanks again!

 

Nicolas

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/commotion-discuss/attachments/20160517/43cbc5de/attachment.html>