Hi everyone. I have an Archer MR200 that I want to flash Openwrt to. I read the how-to and think I understood it.
I downloaded the firmware from the link provided in the how-to , and extracted it.
I also read the instructions on how to use tftp. I will have to deactivate network manager, but that should not be a problem.
I decided on curl because it's already installed, and I don't have any other tftp clients in my repositories (KDE Neon).
My question: how is the curl command line supposed to look like? Right now I have set it to:
ip address add 192.168.0.66/24 dev enp3s0; arp -s 192.168.11.1 02:aa:bb:cc:dd:20; curl -T ArcherC2V1_tp_recovery.bin tftp//:192.168.1.1
But I would like to make sure that's right. Any ideas or suggestions? I'd rather not brick my device, as we live in East Africa, and access to technical equipment needed for unbricking is VERY limited...
One question would be if I need that arp part, and whether I should add a --connection-timeout and/or a --max-time and/or a --retry-max-time option to the curl command line...
Then I strongly advise you not to performa the operation as the mr200 is very easy to (almost) hard brick.
Unless you have a pomona clip and raspberry pi (plus the experience) on hand stay away from this.
Trust me - I went down that road and nearly cost me the mr200 + rpi3b during the recovery process
O.k., thanks for your advice. When did you try to do this? Because two or three years ago, when I looked at the page for the mr200, one still had to assemble the firmware himself, whereas nowadays there is a readymade firmware available...
more than 2 years ago...
I actually bricked it after converting to openwrt trying to get it back to latest ofw thinking i'd get better 4g modem fw.
anyway now it happily runs latest 23.05-rc2 but I must admit on every openwrt fw upgrade I cross my fingers
I'd probably not want to go back to the original fw. It sucks. Especially you can't do ussd codes, which means I have to take the sim card out every time to recharge internet (here in East Africa all internet is prepaid with vouchers)...
As it is, right now the mr200 just lays around doing nothing because of this (and because of powercuts. Thats why I'm using small mobile internet boxes like the m7200 now. But those only give me 10 users, and our organization starts to grow beyond that).
so if it sits idle doing nothing I'd say there's no real big risk I'm just unsure if curl is the right tool for the job - didn;t eveen knew it had tftp support - maybe it will work. Although not a big fan of windows I remember just tftpd32/64 doing its job for tplink recovery - maybe think of it as backup if curl won't do
You will need any tftpclient on any platform. I never used curl for that though.
Please note that tftp//:192.168.1.1 is wrong (should be tftp://...)), I corrected this in the wiki already.
Regarding the staticarp - it is nice to have, this helps reduce the time before a connection can be established, which must happen within a short amount of time while the server is listening.
could you please detail why a tftp client and not a server?
from the procedure perspective the pc is the one providing the file (server from the standard's perspective) and the router is requesting it (client per tftp standard)
