I would like to thank you anybody who is going to help me first of all.
After some time of using the ZyXEL NR7101 I decided to move to OpenWRT and I've followed the information on how to swap the firmware.
After I've uploaded the openwrt-23.05.0-ramips-mt7621-zyxel_nr7101-initramfs-recovery.bin file, the system was supposed to reboot and be reacheable at 192.168.1.1, but it doesn't unfortunately.
The led goes from red to blinking green and then solid green, but nothing. I don't have any reply from 192.168.1.1.
I'm wondering if there is something I could do or the only way is to buy a cable to connect to the serial port and see what is happening.
Thanks for looking into this.
I have also tried the recovery mode by pressing the reset button. It seems to be working because the lights are blinking differently but despite that, no way to ping the unit.
Is there any chance the unit may set a different up address?
By default the unit was having two profile, one on 192.168.1.1 and one on 192.168.10.1
I think it's better to figure out what happened than blindly trying zycast. There is no reason to expect it to work any better than the initial flash attempt, and it will scratch both system partitions.
Of course, if serial console is out the question then zycast is an option. It should at least be able to revert the device to OEM firmware regardless of the OpenWrt state
so there is no ethernet interface configured. This is the config:
root@OpenWrt:/# cat /etc/config/network
config interface 'loopback'
option device 'lo'
option proto 'static'
option ipaddr '127.0.0.1'
option netmask '255.0.0.0'
config globals 'globals'
option ula_prefix 'fdaa:77d1:fe3d::/48'
option packet_steering '1'
config device
option name 'br-lan'
option type 'bridge'
list ports 'lan1'
list ports 'lan2'
list ports 'lan3'
list ports 'lan4'
config interface 'lan'
option device 'br-lan'
option proto 'static'
option ipaddr '192.168.1.1'
option netmask '255.255.255.0'
option ip6assign '60'
config interface 'wan'
option device 'wan'
option proto 'dhcp'
config interface 'wan6'
option device 'wan'
option proto 'dhcpv6'
which is obviously bogus. There are no lan1-lan4 ports on this device. There's only the single "lan" port and it's unconfigured and down:
root@OpenWrt:/# ifconfig -a
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 08:26:97:84:EF:BC
BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1504 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)
Interrupt:21
lan Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 08:26:97:84:EF:BC
BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)
lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:65536 Metric:1
RX packets:320 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:320 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:24960 (24.3 KiB) TX bytes:24960 (24.3 KiB)
Yuck!!!
The good news is that we now know what happend to @xxshazxx and it's rather easy to fix, using either console or zycast (assuming you flash an image without this bug....).
Thank you so much for the help and support.
I will see if I have a way to use the console, I don’t have on hand any serial dongle.
Just to understand, Zycast will work also in my case, that the unit is not setting the network?
Is there a way to get 23.05.1, to test it already ?
Great work! Would this have resulted in soft bricking on upgrade to 23.05.0 from 22.03.5? If so I'm very glad that I waited for reports of success before upgrading.
Shouldn't a big warning be put somewhere on the 23.05.0 release post not to install it on the Zyxel NR7101?
I feel bad for those who have already suffered from this.
Finally, @bmork, really nice how your Zycast utility already has a use case in unbricking here!
@xxshazxx please keep us posted as to how you fix. It will help others. Sorry you suffered with this.
Just for your info, thanks to your tool Zycast I was able to flash back OEM fw.
I will wait the version with the fix and I will try again the change.
Thank you all for the help.
Regards
Ed
Great! Thanks for testing that out. I'm very happy that you were able to fix your router.
Then I think I'll hold off the zycast instructions until we have an official 23.05.1 image we can point to. Unless someone else hits this in the meantime. But I hope we avoid that.
No, not unless you scratched the config. The bug only affects the initial default network configuration.
As long as you keep your old settings when sysupgrading, then you're safe. At least against this particual bug. No guarantees given about anything else.
Just to be sure I didn't say something wrong now I just tested this procedure:
This worked fine, as expected. Just make sure you keep settings when sysupgrading. And don't skip step 2 if you want to use this method to force a fresh install of 23.05.0 while waiting for .1
Good question! Yes, it will. So that's a good reason to wait with 23.05 on the NR7101, I guess.
No, zyflash can only do what the "zyloader" part of the bootloader implements. The flash locations it can write etc are hard coded in the booloader. We can't even avoid it writing the uploaded image twice - to both system partitions. It will always do that on the NR7101.