R310's got stuck in upgrade loop after upgrade from 3.6.2 to 5.2

Summary

This Article explains an upgrade defect that causes R310 AP's to get stuck in firmware upgrade loop after upgrading its firmware to 5.2

Question

Why 802.11ac Wave1 APs are stuck in upgrade loop after upgrading from 3.6.2 to 5.2

Customer Environment

v/SZ 5.2, All 802.11ac Wave 1 APs, R310, R500, R600, T504, T300, T300E, T301N, T301S, FZM300, FZP300

Root Cause

As per EET, this issue happens when customer has a WPA WLAN with auto encryption. This causes a mismatch of cipher list and thus AP gets stuck in firmware upgrade.

Symptoms

We had a mix environment of R610, R710 and R310 AP's with a total of 237 AP's.
After upgrading SZ to 5.2 from 3.6.2.0.227, we changed the AP Zone firmware.
We had a success over all R610's and R710's. However all R310's got stuck in
reboot loop of Firmware upgrade. The AP's were rebooting almost every minute.

User-added image

Troubleshooting Steps

We managed to log into one R310 and found that its primary image is corrupted.
rkscli: fw show all
<Control Info>
control file /writable/fw/main.cntl not in flash
-------------------------------------
current primary boot image is Image1
---------------<Image1 FW header>
** Image invalidated due to upgrade failure. **
Magic:        ????
next_image:   0xffffffff
invalid:      ff
hdr_len:      255
compression: ??
load_address: 0xFFFFFFFF
entry_point: 0xFFFFFFFF
timestamp:    Wed Dec 31 23:59:59 1969
binl7_len:    4294967295
hdr_version: 65535
hdr_cksum:    0xFFFF != 0x1CCC - bad cksum
version:      ??????????????????        ( ??????????????? )
MD5:          FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF
product:      ??????????????????????????????    (255)
architecture: ff
chipset:      ff
board_type:   ff
board_class: ff
customer:     ???????????????????????????????
Image Sign Type: Unsigned Image(UI).
---------------<Image2 FW header>
Magic:        RCKS
next_image:   0x140000
invalid:      0
hdr_len:      160
compression: l7
load_address: 0x80080000
entry_point: 0x803306B0
timestamp:    Wed Jan 30 12:23:14 2019
binl7_len:    13152096
hdr_version: 4
hdr_cksum:    0x4E49
version:      3.6.2.0.695       ( 3.6.2.0.695 )
MD5:          45964FF0D48263E7D8764A1FB4030053
product:      zf7752    (0)
architecture: 1
chipset:      3
board_type:   0
board_class: 3
customer:
Image Sign Type: Fully Signed Image(FSI).
OK

Workaround

You can avoid this problem by changing the encryption type of WPA WLAN (if any) to AES before you change the AP Zone firmware.

If AP’s are already stuck in this state, please try one of the following solutions:

Create a new dummy zone with previous firmware (No WLANs required on this Zone) and moved all problematic AP’s to it. After AP's got their configuration up-to date, move them back to 5.2 zone and AP's will eventually upgrade to 5.2.
Do a factory reset on the APs from AP CLI (set factory), reboot and AP would download the 5.2 image.

Resolution

Engineering have confirmed that this issue impact all Wave1 AP's (i.e R310, R500, R600, T504, T300, T300E, T301N, T301S, FZM300, FZP300 etc.) and they have created an AP Patch: scg-ap-5.2.0.0-5030.patch downloadable from Ruckus Support portal. We need to apply this AP patch before we change the AP zone firmware after upgrading to 5.2 v/SZ release.

KBA-10114: SZ 5.2 AP upgrade fatal error (TSB-2020-002)

Article Number:
000010275

Updated:
April 01, 2020 11:35 AM (over 4 years ago)

Tags:
Firmware, Installation, Troubleshooting, Known Issues and Workarounds, SmartCell Gateway, virtual SmartCell Gateway

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