Ubiquiti Nanostation AC loco device settings not sticking, falling back to RAM overlay

Installing and Using OpenWrt
25

I agree with @psherman. There needs to be a good reason to download and run binary code posted by a stranger, and so far I am not seeing one.

2 Likes
26

not posting black box fw:s is ...

27

Well, I tried to install the latest firmware 23.05.3 from the official source and I couldn't since it was for VA 8.5.x and gave me an error Invalid version and I cannot downgrade my device further by vendor restrictions. The snapshot version has the issue with the storage and falling back to RAM overlay.

28

okay guys, I deleted the link ... have a good one.

29

That is interesting if you have found another way to circumvent the lock on installing third-party firmware. I have found it simplest to install to the AC loco with serial since it is easy to open the case and connect to the port.

30

@mk24 sure I could explain this better from the start ... I was in a rush, sorry :slight_smile:

I got the idea from this patch, which was linked on Common Procedures for Ubiquiti Products - OpenWrt installation on WA and XC boards.

here is a dump from my personal notes how I did it:

  • clone openwrt and configure for build
git clone https://git.openwrt.org/openwrt/openwrt.git
cd openwrt
git checkout v23.05.3
./scripts/feeds update -a
./scripts/feeds install -a
make menuconfig
  • edit ubnt version mk-file for AC loco "WA" to build for the correct version nano ./openwrt/target/linux/ath79/image/common-ubnt.mk
define Device/ubnt-wa
  $(Device/ubnt)
  SOC := ar9342
  IMAGE_SIZE := 15744k
  UBNT_BOARD := WA
  UBNT_CHIP := ar934x
  UBNT_TYPE := WA
  UBNT_VERSION := 8.7.4
endef
  • build openwrt using multi-core
make -j$(nproc) V=s
  • connect via ssh to ubnt and patch fwupdate.real to install firmware via ubntbox
ssh -oHostKeyAlgorithms=+ssh-rsa,ssh-dss admin@10.80.20.137 # ubnt firmware only supports old algo
wget http://... # no https support by ubnt firmware, also no scp ... ubnt firmware is missing sftp-server
hexdump -Cv /bin/ubntbox | sed 's/14 40 fe 27/00 00 00 00/g' | hexdump -R > /tmp/fwupdate.real
chmod +x /tmp/fwupdate.real
/tmp/fwupdate.real -m /tmp/openwrt-ath79-generic-ubnt_DEVICE_MODEL-squashfs-factory.bin
31

Three main reasons (fundamentally an abundance of caution):

  1. A new user posting a link to an unknown destination can be bad. In the past, there have been people who have pointed to malicious sites/files that target people's computers and/or attempt to use our forums for SEO purposes. I'm not saying you are one of those people, but we have no way to know (and I personally do not like to click links to verify that they're okay)
  2. You didn't explain what was unique and useful about your build compared to the standard builds. Best practice is to use the standard builds unless there are specific needs or optimizations required. We do have a community builds section for those... the contributors there are often well known with a good track record of providing quality builds and/or they are providing information about the changes they have made and why
  3. We have no way to know if someone, especially a new user, might have made changes or added code that could negatively impact security or performance. Again, I'm not saying that you would do such a thing, but it's prudent to be skeptical of builds from new users.

Although you have now deleted your link, I had simply deactivated your link enclosing it in a code block. I left it visible to users on the forum so that it would still be available if they wanted to copy/paste into a browser.

1 Like