How to Upgrade TP-Link SMB Router through CLI

Notice:

• Please verify the hardware version of your device for the firmware version. Wrong firmware upgrading may damage your device and void the warranty;
• After you download the firmware from TP-Link website, please use decompression software such as WinZIP or WinRAR to extract the bin file;
• Do NOT turn off the power or disconnect the Ethernet cable during upgrade process, these error operations will damage your device and the damage is irreversible.
• Please export all current settings as a backup before you upgrade.
• Only some of the SMB routers with console port can upgrade through CLI.

Set Up a FTP Server

Before we upgrade the router, we should set up a FTP server first. Here we recommend 3CDaemon as the FTP server, it is based on the Windows operating system and is easy to use, you can also use other FTP tools. Here are the steps to set up FTP server using 3CDaemon.

Step1: Download the 3CDaemon software, and run it on the PC, then connect the PC to the router’s LAN port using Ethernet cable, you can get a IP address automatically from the router or designate a static IP address manually. Make sure the PC’s IP address is in the same subnet of the router’s LAN IP.

Step2: Designate the file path

Designate a file path, here we set “E:\123\” as example. Later, we will put all the relevant file to this folder. The configuration steps show as the picture below:

Set the login user name and password and related authorities:

Here we set the login user as “admin”, password as “666666” for example.

Save all the settings, on the main page, we can see the information of the built up FTP server. The IP address is 192.168.0.2 and the port is 21 in this example.

Step3: Download the corresponding firmware in the TP-Link official website, and extract the bin file, considering the convenience for the later operation, we recommend you to change the file name to a simple one. Here we take the R480T+ v7 as example and change the firmware name to “update.bin”. And then put it into the folder we designate in last step, “E:\123\” in this example.

Step4: login the CLI

Turn on the router and wait until it works normally--connect the router to the PC using the Serial Line--access the CLI interface by using Hyper Terminal or putty--in the User EXEC Mode (TP-Link>), input “enable” command, and then input the router’s login password (“admin” as default) after the prompt--login the Privileged EXEC Mode (TP-Link#), input “sys ?”, we can see the prompt show as below:(You can refer to the UG for more information about how to login to the CLI. Be careful that the baud rate of the R480T+ is 115200.)

From the picture, we can see that in this mode, we can update the firmware, export or import config file, reboot or restore the system and show the system’s information.

In the Privileged EXEC Mode, enter command “sys update”, and then enter FTP server address (192.168.0.2), FTP user name (admin), password (666666) and the firmware file name (update.bin) as the prompt indicates. If the input information is the same as the information in the “[]”, we can just click “Enter” key to go to next command.

If we connect to the FTP server successfully, we can see the prompt message below

If we get the message “the user name or password is wrong”, we should check the user name and password in the FTP server carefully first; If we got message “cannot connect to the FTP server”, we should close all the safety software such as Firewall and then try again. We should also make sure that the Ethernet cable should be connected stably. If it still does not work, you can change another PC and try again.

We should wait until we see the message show as the picture below which means we have upgraded the router successfully.

Note:

1.We can also import or export config file in the same method and the steps are similar.

2.It is highly recommended to upgrade, import or export through web interface, unless you really need.