GS1200-5/-8 stuck in upgrade mode after upgrade via vpn/different subnet

Chris78

When upgrading two GS1200-5/-8 from F/W V2.00(ABME.1)C0 to F/W V2.00(ABME.2)C0 and F/W V2.00(ABKM.1)C0 to F/W V2.00(ABKM.2)C0 respectively via VPN (different subnet) the web ux of both switches got stuck in firmware upgrade mode.

Configuration was fine, switches continued working, but web was inaccessible besides upgrade mode. Repeated upgrades didn't help.

I had to go on site to connect to LAN to do the upgrade once again to finally switch back to normal web ux fortunately.

Quite annoying and defeats the idea of remote upgrades via web interface.

Regards

Zyxel_Chris

@Chris78,
Was there any error message pop-up when stock on the firmware upgrade page, also would it help to click the cancel button?

fe80

I had this same problem upgrading a brand new GS1200-5 from F/W V2.00(ABKM.1)C0 to F/W V2.00(ABKM.2)C0 .  In my case I was accessing the switch via firefox on a Linux system.  The upgrade button seemed to attempt to push firmware (the connected switch port flashed rapidly) but would fail after the 30 second timer finished.  Cancel would reboot the switch, but the UI was stuck in firmware upgrade mode.  Reset and power off/on did not change things.

In the end I looked at the page source and used an external tool to push the update.  Since I was on Linux, I used the 'curl' command, like this (from a shell / command line):

curl -F 'firmware=<firmware.bin' --output curl.out 'http://192.168.1.3/httpupg.cgi?cmd=fw_upgrade'

where I had previously renamed the firmware file to 'firmware.bin' (I don't think this was necessary), and sending the output to curl.out made curl's built-in output check happy.

This seemed to take longer than 30 seconds, so I suspect that the timeout in the web page code is too short.

Chris78

Zyxel_Chris said:

@Chris78,
Was there any error message pop-up when stock on the firmware upgrade page, also would it help to click the cancel button?

No, no error msg. Just plain upgrade mode. Over and over again. If I clicked cancel it would say "upgrade failed" but stay in upgrade mode. Only way was to go on site an connect to LAN. One further difference was that remotely I used Windows 10 (Firefox and Chrome, tried both), and on site I used Firefox on Linux.

Zyxel_Chris

@Chris78,
Have checked on this and it should be the firmware upload did not finish in 40 seconds, therefore the device will stay on the upload page until the next time uploads successfully, this is to prevent any abnormal event during the upgrade and cause the device boot up failed.
Because our firmware size is around 6xx KB in the usual case should finish the upload in 40 seconds, therefore might need you to confirm the upload speed or the connection quality in the environment.

Chris78

Yeah, doesn't convince me. Line was like 40 MBit/s, not 15 Kbit/s. The upload was seemingly finished very quickly.

Plus it should be possible to exit firmware upgrade mode easily which it wasn't.

Cheers

Zyxel_Chris

@Chris78,
The connection quality might also affect if there is a lot of re-transmission and could also not finish in 40 seconds.

The reason why cannot leave the upgrade page is that the switch is doing the upgrade while uploading the firmware, if it doesn't finish in time then it might break the boot image and cause the switch not boot up to prevent this therefore it will stay in this page until upload successfully.
We'll improve the message wording if it fails to upgrade, in case the user misunderstands.