At home, the heart in my network is the EdgeRouter POE 5-port router. My router is, of course, where the outside world of my Wide Area Network (WAN) enters the house. This router supports several devices including switches with Power Over Ethernet (POE) and so without the router my whole network would be dead. Yes, it’s a single point of failure, I know.
Ping loss and strange issues
The other day I noticed a big ping loss, high Round Trip Average (RTA)
numbers and other strange things were going on. I trouble-shooted for
hours, starting from the first device and going back. The last thing in
my analysis was to restart the EdgeRouter POE expecting it to come back
online as it always did before, but it didn’t. It was dead – completely
dead.
Seemed impossible
So, I removed the device from the rack and tested it standalone. Still
nothing. I later decided to do a hard-reset (yes, I’d taken backups of
the config) and used a laptop with its preset static IP (192.168.1.1 is
the default for the EdgeRouter) and I tried to reach the login page.
Still nothing. OK, back to the drawing board.
I searched some forums online, and the first hit said that these routers
are known for having bad USB sticks which hold its operating system. So
I opened it up, and yeah, the USB appeared to me to be rather
inexpensive. Now the problem was how I could make a replacement USB that
I could use. A lot of people were talking about TFTP recovery, but I had no serial cable to hand at home so that wasn’t immediately possible.
The solution!
So after a few hours of searching online, I finally found the best thing I’ve found in years! This is what I’m talking about – a guy who made exactly what I needed – a script to make a USB with the old config in place. Question is, would it work? I can tell you, it did – and it was super easy! The command I personally used was this:
./mkeosdrive /dev/sdb ER-e100.v2.0.8-hotfix.1.5278088.tar edgeos_EdgeRouter-PoE-5-Port_20200703.tar.gz 3
./mkeosdrive = the executable
/dev/sdb = the new USB stick
ER-e100.v2.0.8-hotfix.1.5278088.tar = the EdgeRouter firmware
edgeos_EdgeRouter-PoE-5-Port_20200703.tar.gz = the config file
3 = the size in GB for the new partition (default is 2)
I just wanted more of you to know about this super great tool as I
imagine there are more people with unreliable USB sticks inside their
EdgeRouters, and sooner or later they will give up. Mine was only one
year old. So, save yourself a few bucks, make a new USB stick instead of
buying a completely new router.
