danymarc wrote

But you are addressing this one to me, I'm not the one with the issue

Sorry, then this was a mis-understanding. You said you were the one stating on the OpenWRT CPE page that Windows 10 doesn't work for CPE's TFTP recovery.
Then you said here, that it indeed works for you on Windows 10. What is now correct? Does it work on Windows 10?

Doing lot of TFTP recovery with TP-Link gear for customers I never had any problem to do so, not even once. There are so many issues caused by using Windows that a huge amount of engineering time goes into fixing bugs introduced first time by Microsoft, therefore they are wasting huge amounts of precious lifetime of their own users and also engineering time of technicians not even using MS products.

If Microsoft would have chosen to produce cars instead of computer software, we couldn't even drive 1 kilometer without having to call a mechanic every 5 meters to proceed further. That's no joke! 90% of all calls to our support hotline are Windows-related weirdness having nothing to do with real bugs.

At the end, the one with the issue, isn't updating the post neither with your tips or mine, meaning he is careless
As he is careless, and our lasts post benefit no one
I suggest to erase them scince my useless tip, (according to you) and you know 95% more of OpenWrt than me
I will be visiting the forum, once I see you had erased them I will to

Agreed. See, I really appreciate your long-term experience with CPEs, it's very valuable to developers and all other users to learn about problems or to hear about successful use cases and I very much appreciate tips from you such as the one about UBNT air link calculator in another thread.


But it's Sunday, we have the time today to dig a little deeper into this never-ending story with Windows notorious non-deterministic behaviour called "bugs".

So what follows is some background info just to make it clear why Windows behaves in such weird ways it still does:

Guess which company once did sell the most popular (by installation count) Unix system ever, predecessor of Linux?

It was Microsoft. They did sell Xenix systems, which was a 100% compatible Unix port for then new IBM PCs. MS did even volunteer to provide support for AT&T's own Unix system running on PDP-11 platforms in the 1980s, which AT&T couldn't provide for legal reasons. So the very first systems Microsoft sold once have been properly working Unix systems. This was the crew then at MS:





But then they decided to develop DOS and later Windows to make everything different from their own Xenix for only one reason: to bind customers to MS and especially to sell software, which back in the 1960s and 1970s has been Open Source, free for everyone (yes, hardware was that much expensive, so that every operating system software of any vendor always was included as a gift together with the expensive hardware).

This way Microsoft did invent software one has to pay for. It was absolutely new in the IT industry back in those times to claim money for an operating system.

And it was the beginning of thousands if not millions of bugs and intentionally weird concepts to undermine common standards, so people would be forced to call MS support and, of course, pay for everything to make Bill Gates (on the lower left in the above picture) a rich man. They started kind of an OS war intentionally, not by accident.

Be assured: using Unix/Linux is much easier and will allow you to get your work done much faster than Windows ever could.

It's no coincidence that CPE's firmware, OpenWRT and most other embedded devices use Linux as their software base.

So my recommendation in last 30 years is and will ever be: dare yourself to take a look at Linux, it's not that difficult to use it and it will save you hours, if not days or months of trouble such as a tiny, simple piece of software like TFTPD not working correctly on Windows.

TFTP is a very old standard from late 1970s, it works for decades now on Unix-based and many other platforms without any problems. It's ridiculous that TFTP is not working on modern Windows out of the box.

danymarc wrote

My suggestion, load a tutorial on how to tftp in Ubuntu or the Linux you prefer

Easy. Enter in a terminal window aka shell window the command:

sudo apt-get install atftpd atftp

Done. That's all. Client ( atftp) just included in case you want to test the sever before doing recovery of CPE.

The installation script already created a TFTP directory:

drwxr-xr-x 2 nobody root 4096 Aug 10 11:15 /srv/tftp/

Put your file in there - using sudo cp cpe-firmware.bin /srv/tftp/ - and start the bootloader recovery from the CPE.
Of course you need to find out the IP your PC has in your network (just do a sudo ifconfig -a to see the IP).

and I'm confused with SUDO when to use it when not

sudo is needed for administrative tasks such as installations or writing into directories owned by some other user or displaying sensitive data such as network configs. Therefore you would use sudo to do the things shown above. This is needed b/c Linux has a rights management, which will prevent viruses from installing itself on hard-disks, something Microsoft learned only after two decades of desaster with viruses in DOS and Windows. Glad that they learned it at all, but only b/c of pressure by U.S. government, which refused to buy non-POSIX systems w/o rights mgmt. anymore for governmental institutions.

All I know is that if you don't disconnect hard drive you might lose the info. never happened with a Dell Laptop but with Inspiron Dell PC if I boot Ubuntu from USB
Wipes out the info of the hard drive even if I have partitions, wipes them and I end up with only one partition, this happened booting Ubuntu and Mikrotic

An Ubuntu or Knoppix Live boot image never ever installs itself on or wipes out the hard disks.

If you by accident load the installation image instead of the Live boot image, then yes, it offers you to install itself on some free partition, but it never changes anything on the disk without asking for explicit confirmation beforehand. It even offers to install a bootloader from where you always can still boot your existing Windows, but it even does not offer to delete existing data on any data partition. You have to do this manually, e.g. by cleaning the partition table.

Live images are especially useful to save your work in emergency situations if Windows can't access the hard-disks anymore for whatever reason. Live images often can still access the hard-disk and read the data from a Windows partition if Windows itself refuses to even recognize the hard-disk. Therefore Live images never wipe out anything already present on hard-disks except you explicitly say so, e.g. by re-partitioning.

Linux is your friend, it does exactly what you tell it - not less, not more - and it does it in a reliable, deterministic way.

That being said, I wish you a nice sunday evening and much fun with Linux. Of course, it has a learning curve, but what you learn will be useful in next 50 years. Windows also has a learning curve, but one each again for every OS version. ;)

The term "live image" describes a non-destructive, not self-installing boot image. This image can be booted from CD, from USB sticks, from magnetic tapes, from TFTP servers, from floppy disks, even from punch tapes or whatever you choose as a bootable medium.

A live image differs from a normal boot image in that a so-called "live image" does not start an installation procedure automatically after boot, but just brings up the operating system in normal operation mode, meaning you will immediately be able to use the desktop GUI with almost all applications as if you would have installed it permanently. Since a live image just runs in main memory (RAM) and does not touch your hard-disks, every change on files in such a live image takes place only in the main memory and therefore will be lost on shutdown.

So, live images are very useful if you want try out Linux without having to go through the full installation procedure and - most important - if you want to test it without changing a single bit of data already on your hard-disks, although you could access the hard-disk's content from within a live image if you want to do so, but usually only in a non-destructive, read-only mode by default.

If you are new to Linux and just want to see what it looks & feels like, use a live image. If you like what you see, you might then choose to install it permanently on your hard-disk.

If Windows ever makes trouble with not being able to access a hard-disk (i.e. not booting anymore), use a Linux live image to see wether you can access the disks and save your data. Some of my customers did this more than once successfully, although Windows reported the disks as defective.