EAM Platinum firmware recovery for CTBTO digitisers

Contents

Recovery procedure

This recovery procedure can be useful if the firmware has become damaged by a partial upgrade. If this procedure is not able to recover your unit, then the unit must be returned to Güralp Systems for reflash. If this is the case, please contact support for details and to arrange an RMA. Note: instructions for resetting the root password have been moved to here.

Preparation

Physical access to the unit will be required. Equipment required: A suitable rsync/upgrade server is required. You therefore need either:

Booting

  1. Connect the console cable between the GPIO socket of the digitiser and the laptop/PC (the "recovery machine"), using a USB/serial adapter if necessary.
  2. Open the terminal emulator on the recovery machine and set it to 38400 baud, 8N1.
  3. Apply power to the digitiser.
  4. Almost immediately, there should be some output. Approximately two screens (2×25 lines) of output will be displayed.
  5. There will be a series of yes or no questions. Answer no (by pressing the The 'N' key key) to each question. Very old bootloaders have some minor differences, but the questions should be as below. If any question is accidentally answered yes, it is safe to simply remove and re-apply power, starting the process again.
Boot-up procedure questions (answer 'n'): 
Attempt rsync update ? (y/N) n
Boot main via kexec ? (Y/n) n
Boot main via switch_root ? (y/N) n
Mount successful but no boot options available
Attempt scripted NAND device reinstall ? (y/N) n
At this point, you are now at a shell prompt and can continue the process as below: 
/ #

Reflashing the firmware

Set up networking

Either…

If you are using DHCP to configure your network, run: 
ifconfig lo 127.0.0.1
route add -net 127.0.0.0 netmask 255.0.0.0 lo
udhcpc --script /etc/udhcpc.sh --now --interface eth0

…or…

If you are not using DHCP and need to assign your networking parameters statically, find the correct values and then run: 
ifconfig eth0 192.168.0.2 netmask 255.255.255.0
route add default gw 192.168.0.1
echo "nameserver 8.8.8.8"> /etc/resolv.conf

Set system date

The date must be set to something sensible because, otherwise, files will have incorrect modification times, which will cause various malfunctions. In the command below, replace:
mm
with the Month (01 to 12);

dd
with the Day (01 to 31);

HH
with the Hour (00 to 23);

MM
with the Minute (00 to 59); and

YYYY
with the Year (2011 upwards)
The command should be entered as 
date mmddHHMMYYYY
The data and time should be entered in UTC, regardless of your current time zone.

Erase NAND flash

This will destroy all your settings and data in the buffer (it won't affect data recorded on any mass storage device). There is no way to retrieve anything from the unit after running these commands. 
umount /mnt
flash_eraseall /dev/mtd3
mount -t yaffs /dev/mtdblock3 /mnt
The flash_eraseall command will probably complain about multiple bad blocks and failures. This is normal for NAND flash. However, it should tick all the way up to 100%. If it aborts early then there is potentially a hardware problem. The last mount command must succeed, or there is a problem somewhere and the unit will likely need to be returned to GSL support.

Copy files on

In the example below it may be necessary to replace rsync.guralp.com with its IP address (currently 80.68.92.160) or with the name of your local rsync server. This step will download about 50Mb of image data. 
rsync --super --verbose --stats --human-readable --progress \
    --itemize-changes --recursive --times --links --perms \
    --chmod=ugo+r,+X --force \
    rsync://rsync.guralp.com/ctbto-stable/CMG-DCM-mk4-eabi/ /mnt/
If this step fails at start-up (temporary failure in name resolution, no route to host, etc.) then something is wrong with the networking configuration. If it fails part way through, or at the end, something is likely wrong with the unit and it will need to be returned to the factory. If the rsync command completes successfully, create some necessary files: 
cp -a /dev/null /mnt/dev
cp -a /dev/zero /mnt/dev
cp -a /dev/console /mnt/dev
mkdir -p /mnt/etc/conf.local
echo set_hwclock `date +%s` > /mnt/.magic_upgrade
sync
Each of these commands is critical and must not fail.

Finalise

Now it is safe to power-cycle the digitiser. You can also boot the new system without power cycling by running: 
kexec -l /mnt/boot/zImage
kexec -e
You can watch its boot progress on the console port. The first boot can take several minutes as the system will have to run through some basic initialisation procedures. However, you should eventually have a login: prompt, at which point you can log in as root using the default password (see note below) and refer to the Platinum manual to reconfigure the device.
Note : The previous default root password is now routinely tried by hackers during brute-force atacks. As a result, this procedure now changes the root password to . We strongly recommend that you change this to something secure if the unit is to be connected to the Internet. Please see our Platinum security guide