XHR request time out when flashing sysupgrade

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

I'm trying to install OpenWrt on a MikroTik hAp ac lite and successfully reach the netboot stage. So the router does pull the openwrt-24.10.5-ath79-mikrotik-mikrotik_routerboard-952ui-5ac2nd-initramfs-kernel.bin image and I can access Luci as described. The next step, uploading the actual image fails reliably by running into the "XHR request timed out" error for
openwrt-24.10.5-ath79-mikrotik-mikrotik_routerboard-952ui-5ac2nd-squashfs-sysupgrade.bin as well as openwrt-24.10.4-ath79-mikrotik-mikrotik_routerboard-952ui-5ac2nd-squashfs-sysupgrade.bin. This behavior is consistent with and without my adblocker running.

Is there a way to either avoid this or at least get some info, what exactly went wrong?

2

Wget the image directly from the router, store it in /tmp and run the sysupgrade command ?

Or scp it there from a client.

3 Likes
3

Thank you for pointing me there, I have two new symptoms to report:

  • wget runs into Failed to send request: Operation not permitted
  • and scp triggers a reboot.

I checked the available space with free: 12188. I assume these are kilobytes as the free on the router ignores all options that request another unit and kB are the default. This should be plenty for the 7.x MB image.

I'll see what ssh and netcat get me.

4

wget error is due to network config.

use wan port when connecting to upstream router.

make sure you force the scp protocol if doing the transfer via scp, default is sftp.

5

Sooo. Wget seems to be out due to the structure of my network (I didn't reach luci under the address the router's WAN had been assigned, thus being unable to set the required root password). This could as well have been caused by me missing some detail when shutting down the DHCP on my laptop and plugging network cables, so it will get a second attempt tomorrow.

Scp had been forced via -O option and crashed the router. So did transferring the image via netcat. The ssh method failed with ash claiming that cat was an unknown command (WTF?).

To me it looks like any attempt to write a significant amount of data to /tmp crashes my router. Which is consistent with the attempts via the web interface failing. In order to avoid copying the image to /tmp, I will try sshfs mounting the image on my laptop to the router.

6

This might be a low mem device (haven't looked for the specs), try flashing a way older release instead of 24.10, like 19.07.

7

Yaaaaaaayyy!

The oldest image I found for my device was 21.02 and it worked as advertised via the web interface. With that running I was even able to upgrade to the most recent version (24.10.5). So the initramfs I used (24.10.4) seems to have a problem with incoming data.

Thank you for holding my hand here <3

1 Like