I am a new OpenWRT user, migrating my 2 ISP provided Xiaomi CR6609 routers through following this guide. For the purpose of making the transition I bought a Totolink X5000R and with a little help from the product support team, who confirmed that OpenWrt can be safely installed, I seamlessly upgraded to my first OpenWrt firmware.
Having two boxes of Xiaomi CR6609 I wanted to do the transition to OpenWRT while I still use X5000R sparely for wifi, and the process of installing OpenWRT went smoothly. On Friday, I downloaded the snapshot (openwrt-ramips-mt7621-xiaomi_mi-router-cr6609-squashfs-firmware.bin) from the repository, but the new installation has no LuCi installed. I have ping to internet, so I did a quick opkg update, which gives me errors (in many parts: base, luci, kmods, routing, telephony) and the upgrade to LuCi cannot proceed.
Luckily I have my X5000R with LuCi available, and the first impressions of the UI are great - I was able to set up my first router in the "mesh", but I'd still want to put at least one of the Xiaomis to the test to compare the performance between these two mt7621 based hardwares.
I tried using a different repository, the fact of me being under the "great firewall", but found out that snapshots upgrades are not supported and was redirected here, where I have no idea how to proceed.
the snapshot was a couple of days old, that is the reason i couldn't install LuCi.
Could I safely follow the same guide to reinstall the current snapshot firmware? That is: would a simple ssh upload of the new firmware and mtd -r write /tmp/openwrt-squashfs-firmware.bin firmware
work or is there danger of bricking the device this way?
The guide says:
Since UART access is locked ootb, you should get UART access by modify uboot env. Otherwise, your router may become bricked.
This was obviously before I installed new firmware and I suppose the device should be "open" or "rooted" by now. Should these be performed before, just in case?
nvram set boot_wait=on
nvram set bootdelay=3
nvram commit
and
nvram set flag_try_sys1_failed=0
nvram set flag_try_sys2_failed=1
nvram commit
Besides, the device seems pretty easy to work on and installing LuCi after committing a current snapshot shouldn't be a problem IMO (uneducated, though).
This was a piece of cake following the CLI upgrade guide. It is after all linux and ssh, which I am quite familiar with. Now I have 3 up-to-date devices running OpenWRT for merely ~40€, not too shabby.
I believe I still need to do the opkg update in order to bring up the option of installing LuCi on Xiaomis? Because the image is fresh there should be no package mismatches.
For later upgrades (if i need them at all, as I am not a fan of upgrades, scared something might break: my main wired router/gateway Nighthawk R7000 still runs a 2019 version of ddwrt, maybe in the future I will transition that device to OpenWRT too, mainly because the maintainer switched to OpenWRT and ditched DDWRT altogether), I will follow the above sysupgrade method, thank you for the reminder.
No, I haven't. Moving to a new place I had to newly upgrade my setup and was only familiar with DDWRT. I know my main gateway should be the most up-to-date and secure, but for now it is working perfectly as a gateway to ISP's modem and as of today "linking" my three MT7621 dumb APs together.
I guess DDWRT's software is a bit outdated and I could better use the RAM and USB port on Nighthawk, but have no idea if Tomato or OpenWRT will make much difference for a gateway.
Edit: Just checked and the AT firmware is even older (2017) than my current DDWRT build (2019), so I guess no need to consider Tomato...