Hi there,
My TP-W9980B should be flashed to LEDE (from factory firmware).
Is there a way to do this without opening the device?
I tried as described in the links below (de/encrypting a modified config file with enabled system telnet access). They are using the "StatPOSTer-20160306.jar" tool for this, but this gives me a wrong file format when loading it into the router. Neither it can decrypt the my config file. Maybe it is because this is the german version TP-W9980B
I'm not sure if I should make the effort to open the hardware. What else can I try? Is it dsl even working with LEDE on this device?
Thanks
K
It appears that the W9980B uses a different flavor of encryption than the W9980, and the StatPOSTer tool (latest version 20160306 as of this writing) can't encrypt it. (Decryption never works with any W9980, B or not.)
I'm afraid opening the device and going in via UART is currently the only way to convince it to run LEDE. I've got an W9980B on my workbench that is awaiting the same treatment.
From personal experience, the W8970 is running perfectly fine with whatever flavor of DSL you throw at it. Since they have the same DSL hardware, I don't have any doubts that the W9980(B) will run DSL just fine. However, LEDE currently can't use the 5GHz wifi, which is unfortunate.
I confirm that after following the web interface hack mentioned here: https://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/td-w9980, I was able to install LEDE (both stable and snapshot versions) to the TP-W9980, not the B version though. It is working fine, only the 5GHz wifi is missing, as mentioned before. I've even created my own custom LEDE image with the ImageBuilder; it's pretty easy.
Something for posterity: So at long last, I got around to flashing that W9980B of mine, and it works perfectly fine with LEDE 17.01.1. The UART flashing procedure outlined on the OpenWrt wiki page works, as cumbersome as it might be. But you really should not follow the outdated recommendation to flash the W8970 image, you'll end up without Wifi and with a wrong set of LEDs. Use the W8980 image file, or if you flashed a W8970 image before, forcefully sysupgrade to the W8980 image with -F.