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

J. Heretic jking at chambana.net
Tue May 17 12:35:56 UTC 2016


Hi Nicolas,

I'm going to grab some picostations from the office today and try again
to reproduce the problem you're having.

On Tue, 2016-05-17 at 11:13 +0200, Nicolas North wrote:
> 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


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