We had one of our Balance 305 units start failing (“unable to save config”, which I assume means failing flash) and want to replace it with a Balance 310 we have.
Unfortunately, the config backup seems to not be compatible and is not in a simple plain text format. We emailed Peplink and they said they could “convert” it, but after repeatedly trying to follow up on the ticket we still don’t have an answer. They also seemed to get very confused after we also sent a diagnostic file for them to confirm that our error is related to failing flash, saying that “the config isn’t stored there” (it is, though, but we also sent the actual config file as well).
This should be a lot less difficult.
Any tips on “converting” the file myself? Looks to be a gzipped tar file. I’m guessing maybe interface names and a few other things are different.
Your Peplink reseller should be able to able. Otherwise we can do it for you (as long as Peplink config conversion tool on our partner portal still works )
We don’t have a reseller that I know of, we just buy these things on Amazon or wherever.
Disappointed their support won’t do this, or even answer if it’s possible. We’ve got like half a dozen or more of these out there for customers.
Anyhow, here’s some info on the file format:
Extract it, seems to be gzip, but “gunzip” doesn’t like it. 7Zip does: spork@SporkBook Downloads % 7zz e balance-310-conf
The extracted file is a standard tar file:
spork@SporkBook Downloads % tar tvzf balance-310-conf~
drwx------ 0 root root 0 Aug 18 10:11 ./
-rw-r--r-- 0 root root 41 Aug 18 10:11 ./__md5__
-rw------- 0 root root 5463 Aug 18 10:10 ./config
-rw-r--r-- 0 root root 46 Aug 18 10:11 ./__engine__
-rw-r--r-- 0 root root 4 Aug 18 10:11 ./__archive__
-rw-r--r-- 0 root root 5 Aug 18 10:11 ./__version__
-rw-r--r-- 0 root root 7 Aug 18 10:11 ./__variant__
-rw-r--r-- 0 root root 7 Aug 18 10:11 ./__model__
I’ll post more info, probably put up a little blog post about the format. I hate when companies intentionally make working with their hardware so hard, it’s just such a red flag.
Yeah, the whole “you get different levels of support based on where you buy our product” model is not my favorite.
I did create a ticket, they simply didn’t respond for days, then told us that a “diagnostics” file (which we sent just to show them the failure of the 305 in case they felt like addressing that) was not the “right file”. We’d sent the config file days earlier.
I ended up figuring out the archive format with its “special” header and did the conversion myself.
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