Hello community,
I do these posts in an effort to save some poor b@stard from the same frustrations I've been experiencing.
Cambium have a habbit of ommitting important information that is crucial for certain things to work. One of these things is with the initial (first flash) Mikrotik initramfs boot image. Without this you cannot boot boot into ePMP software and load the permanent Elevate software that is needed, yet its hard to find and does not work. Point in case, the firmware image for the MIKROTIK LHG5 is not in the current release list (why?) and the only one that is available is in the Elevate archive (here) but as mentioned, this does not work. It boots up, but any attempt to update results in a premature reboot that bring you back in ROS. Critical things to know:
- The only boot initramfs that works was provided by this community member here. It is named "MIKROTIK-LHG5-initramfs-v4.3.2.1.elf". "MIKROTIK-lhg5-elevate.elf" located in the archive does NOT work (labelled "MIKROTIK-lhg5-elevate.bin" which is v4.2.x something). Using a different Elevate tar.gz package WILL not solve this problem.
- If your Mikrotik has factory firmware greater than 6.40.8, you will not be able to downgrade the firmware to 6.40.8 which means you CANNOT use the Elevator Tool as Cambium support keeps telling people to do. Why?... Mikrotik implemented a hard firmware lock that prevents any ROS version lower than the factory firmware from being flashed onto a it. The ONLY way to load the Elevate initramfs is via TFTP which works very well from a Windows machine or VirtualBox VM using TFTP64.
- I can confirm that Mikrotik SXTsq 5 HP hardware "RBSXTsq5HPnD" works. I almost gave up trying to Elevate these because I thought Mikrotik had introduced newer hardware, but as discovered, the available Elevate initramfs boot image was the culprit...
Other stuff to NB.
Beware of non-matching MTU's in ethernet interfaces leading up to Elevated devices as these can sometimes cause the innacessibility to web interface or registration with cnMaestro.
I hope this helps,
Cheers, Tim.
