Hey there,
first time user here. I just replaced the old 7490 with a newer model that supports glass fibre internet and I thought I'd give OpenWRT a try. I went to the wiki, identified my model as the micron model and tried to get it into ramboot but for some reason that's turning out to be a real problem.
I managed to get eva_ramboot to write its things once -- no idea how. It seemed like nothing happened after the write (maybe I was too impatient) so I rebooted the router again. Since then I've been completely unable to get eva_ramboot to connect -- in about a dozen attempts. I'm always getting "Connection refused" until the router has finished booting.
I've hacked together a bash one-liner but not even that is able to connect: while true; do ping -c 1 192.168.178.1 -W 100 && {python eva_ramboot.py 192.168.178.1 openwrt-25.12.2-lantiq-xrx200-avm_fritz7490-micron-initramfs-kernel.bin && break} || sleep 0.2; done
I'm almost thinking the router has somehow disabled this maintenance access, but logging into its web interface doesn't reveal anything.
Any idea what I'm doing wrong?
Thanks!
Network card on PC do not get up fast enough for bootloader. Add switch between fritz and your PC. Or just use two ports of your router.
Yeah the network interface coming up too slowly seems plausible, but I'm confused why, to be honest. It's a recent mid-range motherboard so it should really work, methinks. But damn, a switch will work?
Thanks for the help, I'll give that a try!
If it doesn't work with a switch, I've had a case where the Fritz!Box had a completely different IP at this stage. I don't know how and why, but it took me a while to figure this out. IIRC, I used the AVM Recovery Tool on Windows, that was able to detect the box independently of the IP address and printed the correct IP address to the log file.
The switch suggestion is the first thing I’d try. Also set the PC interface to a static address in 192.168.178.0/24 and start eva_ramboot before powering the 7490, then apply power and let it catch the short EVA window. Some NIC/driver combinations miss that window even on new hardware. If it still refuses through a switch, a quick tcpdump/Wireshark capture during boot is useful: if you see ARP or traffic from a different address, that would match andyboeh’s recovery-tool hint.
kicking DHCP out of the equation was actually the solution! Thank you so much!
Edit: Since it seems kinda difficult to get a hold of the renesas firmware, I just want to note that I got mine from the Armbian github repository and it works fine: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/armbian/firmware/refs/heads/master/renesas_usb_fw.mem