I'd like to install OpenWrt on my TP-Link RE350 v1 range extender.
The device page (here) seems to have mostly default information, so I'm reaching out to get help before I brick my device.
There is only a kernel bin, no factory or sysupgrade images in the firmware selector (here) and in the image file directory (here).
How do I install OpenWrt with just the kernel.bin?
How do I get a sysupgrade image in the future to upgrade to the latest version of OpenWrt?
Thank you in advance.
There are (currently) no factory or sysupgrade images built for the RE350. Haven't been since 22.03.
The buildlog does not show any errors, but the images don't make it through tplink-safeloader indicating that the resulting image files would be too large.
You don't.
That's disappointing, but thank you for your quick response.
It is one of very unlucky devices with too much space set aside for OEM data.
You can install old release, config with luci, then sysupgrade to luci-less 23.05.4
It happens when you expand package selection in firmware selector, default selection installs no LuCI on 8MB devices.
Thank you for your insight. I was planning to use this for a family travel router (none of which are command line saavy), so luci is needed.
For self edification, I tried to implement your suggestion.
The last version in the firmware selector that has factory and sysupgrade images is 21.02.7 built on 2023-04-28. So I could flash the device with this and then try a luci-less sysupgrade.
I tried the to generate a sysupgrade image using the "Customize installed packages and/or first boot script" option in the firmware sector tool by selecting 23.05.4 and deleting the luci package, but it failed with "Error: No JSON file found".
Is that the right way to go about it?
The image file is still too large then.
In one of the last steps, the firmware image is put through a tool called tplink-safeloader that squeezes it into the device's partition layout. If the image does not fit (if I read it correctly, into 0x5e0000, i.e. 6,160,384 bytes) this fails, and it fails silently. The "JSON file not found" error is not the actual error that prevents building the images, but an error down the line when the images that should have been built are not found.
It's possible to have sysupgrade and factory images built If you remove enough packages, but then the images might not be able to do what you expect them to do anymore.
Thanks again for taking the time to respond.