Firmware is renamed to rb-nor-flash-16M-ac-initramfs-kernel.bin
DNS is served from a Mikrotik router with bootp support.
The TFTP server is a Synology NAS TFTP.
I am booting from eth1 as expected.
I can see that the file rb-nor-flash-16M-ac-initramfs-kernel.bin is fetched by network boot.
However, if I plug the eth2 ethernet connector to my laptop, and set address 192.168.1.10 I cannot ping 192.168.1.1.
Running wireshard shows no activity on the eth2 interface of the hAP AC.
Do you have any idea what is going wrong?
It seems that the hAP lacks proper network initialisation.
After around 20 hours or playing and hacking around the hAP ac ... still no luck.
I spent the whole day trying to hack the Mikrotik hAP ac and could not find a way to boot it over OpenWRT. I played with various OpenWRT firmware 7.4.1 and 7.5 and bricked the device several times and had to reinstall using netinstall.
I followed the General Mikrotik installation using dnsmasq on a Debian station.
I could not get the hAP ac to boot using dhcp or boot configuration.
The problem is that I don't have serial console access. So I installed a USB to serial converter with null-modem. I can see console but only after booting. So I don't have access to the serial console boot menu.
So if anyone knows how to boot the Mikrotik hAP with firmware 7.4.1 over bootp I would be delighted. Switching this issue to development as it is obviously not a simpe install task.
Follow these steps to downgrade to an older version
Make sure you have npk packages of the same architecture type as your device.
Upload the older version npk files to the device with FTP, Webfig or Winbox.
Issue the command line command /system/package/downgrade
Issue the command /system/reboot
I spent the whole day trying to TFTP boot.
I did verify that I could tftp the file from command line.
My station has no firewall (it is disabled) and is connected with a wire to the hAP ac eth1 port (WAN).
I only have experience with a single MikroTik device - the RB5009UG+S+IN - but once I set a 192.168.88.x IP on the system running the TFTP server, and a corresponding DHCP range, TFTP started working.
The newer bootloader only uses BOOTP and will not boot properly with any options for some reason. I am on Windows and patched tftpd64 to support it, perhaps a similar patch can be made for dnsmasq or there is a config to turn off all unneeded options.
Under OpenWRT v19.07.09 the hAP AC only offers a/b/n on the first radio.
The second radio with ac support is not seen by the system.
The sfp port is not recognised.
Before flashing OpenWRT and upgrading, I need to confirm that only v19.08.09 works. So I will confirm various testing before installing OpenWRT.
File is sent to the hAP ac and then nothing happens.
I used the following image:
openwrt-22.03.0-rc6-ath79-mikrotik-mikrotik_routerboard-962uigs-5hact2hnt-initramfs-kernel.bin (first attempt)
and OpenWRT snapshot (second attempt)
Not having console on the hAP AC is a real pain.
After two days of hacking I am becoming quite discouraged.
So my question is: should I install OpenWRT 19.07 and then sysupgrade?
WPA3-SAE is also supported and works on the hAP AC, which is a good surprise as a lot of people on Mikrotik website claimed that the hAP AC would never support WPA3.
The average speed is 350-360 Mbit/s which is near maximum speed of AC networks with two radios.
Also I could connect using ssh on the hAP ac and monitor CPU usage, which is close to 1% during test. So everything which was written about the hAP ac being slow and consuming CPU resources is pure nonses. It is indeed a very good and up-to-date device.
I think Mikrotik should contact the writer of the article about the hAP ac being slow and ask him to remove the article OR device to suit him for false information. I cannot elaborate on that but it is probably an article being written by a competitor.
The hAP AC is CPU bottlenecked even with 2 chain devices - notice your screenshot shows 97% in SIRQ which is processing hardware interrupts, i.e. maxed out. No idea why they put a 3 chain radio in it when the CPU can't use it.
PS - if using it as a pure AP, you can get some additional throughput by removing all netfilter / conntrack modules.
I did some testing on an ARM8 4 core AP and found that SIRQ was near 25%, so this means that the AP is constantly interrupting. As wireless is (probably) a single core process, I don't know if this really means something. So it does not bother me to see nearly 100% interruption.
I installed ethtool-full but don't know which command to run to find the SFP port.
If I run ifconfig -a the SFP port is not listed.
Also, I would like to configure PoE out on ethernet port 5 (LAN 4 in OpenWRT).
The hAP AC is able to provide chain PoE out on port 5 when PoE in is provided. Mikrotik describes this as "passive PoE". This can be used to chain 2 APs together.
There is a module kmod-i2c-gpio but don't know if this is suitable.
