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How to unbrick a TP-Link TL-WA860RE v1

17/09/2018 juliogonzalez 2

Short story: a member of my family got a refurbished TP-Link repeater TL-WA860RE v1 from Amazon a while ago . He tried to configure it but could not, so just stored it in the box until last month, I came to his home and asked him about the repeater (at that point warranty was already expired).

As he told me he was not able to make it work, I gave it a try: The repeater was able to provide an IP address with DHCP to any computer connected to the Ethernet port, but status LED was always yellow, the WebUI was not available, and of course there was no way of configuring it (no telnet, no SSH, nothing).

In the end I discovered that the previous owner failed to flash a firmware on the device, so I saw a lot of errors regarding USB subsystem, kernel modules and even Squash Filesystem: (more…)