I think my failsafe and normal partitions have somehow been kajigerred.

I've been Googling and reading docs for a few hours, I need to go to sleep so I'm going to drop my question here and hope someone can help. I apologize if I'm making a silly mistake.

Background - I am brand new to OpenWRT. I have some limited networking experience, a little Linux knowledge (I can get around and do basic things easily), I like to tinker. I am a Windows guy though so a lot of this is beyond my depth.

I installed OpenWRT on my EA4500 following the Wiki here: https://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/linksys/ea … ecommended.

This was straightforward, it didn't take the firmware the first time but on the second time, it flashed and rebooted.

This is where the problems began.

I had already read that I would need to set a root password before being able to do much else. I was not able to access the router via ssh nor telnet. I used putty, pointed it at 192.168.1.1, nothing. Tried setting the username to root, nothing. Every time, I get "No route to host". With telnet, there is a similar error, but I don't remember what it was. Windows will not let anything use the ethernet adapter because it thinks it's not connected. I don't have a console cable or a serial cable to try and dig deeper with this, but that should be unnecessary anyways, unless I'm missing something very basic in the docs.

So I read more and found the failsafe mode, which works perfectly. I may have made a mistake here. I got logged in via ssh, set the root password, and ran mount_root. Then I installed LuCI from the shell following this guide: https://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/luci.essentials; I ran everything up to and including the 'uhttpd enable' command. Then I installed some other packages, and configured wifi and some other various settings. Then I thought to myself, you idiot, you're still in failsafe mode. So I rebooted just to see what would happen, of course, it was the same as last time, no way to get into the router.

So once again I booted to failsafe mode, except now all my configuration from before has remained. I took a backup of this config. I then ssh'd in again, installed sftp server, and used WinSCP to grab the contents of /etc/config/ and /overlay/upper/etc/config/. I compared a hash of these files and they are all identical from /etc/ to /overlay/upper/etc/ - but this is all in failsafe mode - and I don't know if that's a problem.

I have an idea of what I've done - I've done all my configuration on the failsafe partition instead of the "overlay" partition, or user partition, or whatever it's called. Still learning here!

Anyways, I don't know what I need to do to swap this around so that I can reboot my router and not have a gimped version of OpenWRT. I'm also concerned there may be security issues with running in failsafe mode 24/7. I am more than happy to give the contents of any files if it helps figure out what's going on here.

I'm on Windows 10, have Putty, telnet, WinSCP, etc.

I also have a Raspberry Pi I could possibly use to configure the router from, if it's going to be vastly easier to do from Linux.

Thanks and again, sorry if this is a common problem or I've made a stupid mistake - I've searched and come up with nothing. Also interested to know how one would ssh into a router via IP (for the initial setup) if the router isn't routing... does one need a second router to do this, or console cable, or ... ?

Hi shultz11588, have you tried booting into the working partition by forcing three failed boots? From the EA4500 wiki -

"Note: No need for a 30/30/30 reset on this device. In the event of a bad flash, the router shall obviously fail to reboot but don't despair. After three consecutive failed reboots, the router then reverts back to its former working partition and boots normally. Based on this understanding, both EA4500 and E4200 v2 shall always have a partition with a working firmware."

So if you force three failed boots, it should boot into the working partition, if you've only flashed OpenWrt once, the working partition it will boot into will be the stock firmware, i used that process on my EA3500 and it should be the same for the EA4500 which is very similar, i described it here - https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php … 33#p329533

Or, if you can install packages in failsafe, you might try installing kmod-gpio-button-hotplug which will get your reset button working and just try a reset with the button, i think i'd try booting into the working partition first though.

I considered that, but I want to use openWRT, I'm not really interested in using the stock firmware any longer. I could get back to stock and attempt to reflash, but I think I'm maybe misunderstanding the initial login step. How can I ssh to the router if it's not routing? I am plugged in to Ethernet 1 via Ethernet cable, and the router is attached to the modem at the WLAN port. Do I have to do additional network config on the client I am configuring it from (windows 10)? Is there an easy way to detect the problem from within failsafe mode? I read that you must mount_root and compare the core config to the overlay, but when I do that they are the same. I'd really like to have a way to get to the bottom of this issue and understand what I did wrong, or what the bug is, rather than keep reflashing or hack my way around the problem.

Not to say your advice isn't helpful, just not what I'm looking for.

I'm not familiar with the workings of failsafe yet unfortunately, i just started using OpenWrt recently myself, but our routers are very similar so i'll give a short walkthrough of my initial login/setup so you'll have something to compare against :

After installing OpenWrt i keep my router connected directly to my laptop with an ethernet cable going from one of the lan ports of the router to the ethernet port on my laptop, i'm on linux so i then open a terminal and ssh into 192.168.1.1, on Windows you'll use Putty obviously, both our routers use the Designated Driver build (aka trunk) so there's no need to telnet or set a password, ssh will work directly from the beginning. Once i've ssh'ed into the router and have access to the settings, i go to etc/config/wireless and enable the wifi, then i restart wifi, then i reboot and ssh into the router again just to make sure everything stuck. If everything is fine at that point i'll disconnect the router from the laptop and connect it to my modem as normal, go back to my laptop and connect to the OpenWrt wifi, once i've established internet connection i'll ssh back into the router, install all my packages and do all my configs and that's it, hope that helps.

(Last edited by mikemccartney on 12 Jul 2016, 23:28)

Hi shultz11588,

I've got an EA4500 (v1) with openwrt as well, and due to bad network settings I've locked myself out. However no matter what combination of keys and timings, I cannot get the failsafe mode to be triggered. The only significant LED (the one on the front behind the logo) goes from fade - fast blink - slow blink - continuous light so not the failsafe blink pattern. Also, network sniffing does not show a magic packet, nor does pinging to 192.168.1.1 yield any result.
What am I doing wrong?

Thx