Factory reset after firmware upgrade of TP-Link SG3424

Since about a year I have a TP-Link SG3424, a manageable 24-ports gigabit switch that so far has proven to be table and reliable and was a good deal when I bought it compared to similar devices. It’s not a Cisco switch, but honestly I do not know what I am missing out on given the feature set is has. So far it covered my needs and has been operational without any noticable issues or hiccups. The only drawback (for me) so far was that it lacked IPv6 support, but that’s optional on an internal network anyway.

Today I noticed that TP-Link released a new firmware version in December for the SG-3424 switch that added IPv6 support and is available from their support site’s download page. I followed the installation guide, which was completely correct, but a bit incomplete as I had a few surprises during my upgrade:

  1. The installation manual instructs you to change your network settings to the 192.168.0.X network. As I have an operational environment using another IP range, I happily ignored this and was able to perform the upgrade. However, after the upgrade, I could no longer reach my switch until I changed the IP address of my laptop to the 192.168.0.X network. This is not an issue for someone that knows what he is doing, but should have been mentioned in the installation manual in my opinion…
  2. After the firmware update, the switch was back at its factory settings and lost all configuration settings (including the logins, so I had to login with admin/admin again). This is bad TP-Link, even if your update process requires a full reset, PUT IT IN THE UPGRADE MANUAL at least…
    Fortunately I have a tendency to make backups before I change things and did create a backup before the update , but it was a surprise one would not expect.
  3. When restoring the configuration, all settings were restored correctly EXCEPT the logins and password of the admin user. Again, not a blocker, but a surprise and something NOT DOCUMENTED.

All in all minor things that one can resolve pretty easily, but not something you would expect from a company that positions the product at the professional market… Cisco-like 10+ upgrade guides are a pain to get through, but a 2-pager with only half of the information doesn’t help either.

Apart from these glitches, the upgrade was worthwile as the switch now has IPv6 support, which functions great and has (as always) all features one can imagine (like being able to add manual addresses next to the auto-negotiation addresses, support for RA and DHCP6, support for IPv6 on all services like SSH and SNMP) appear to work fine.