netgear, network, switch

Upgrading firmware for Netgear GS105Ev2 switch on Mac OS

Yesterday I got the rest of my new home network gear, namely Netgear GS105Ev2 and GS108Ev3 managed switches. Like with all new hardware I tend to first check is the firmware up to date so that I get all the bug fixes and new features of the latest software. I noticed that both of them were running old firmwares, GS108Ev3 running the second latest firmware and GS105Ev2 running 1.4.x whereas the latest was 1.5.0.4.

Updating the GS108Ev3 was really easy, I just downloaded the latest firmware, unzipped it and uploaded the .bin file using the web based tool found in the admin panel. Just couple of minutes and my switch was running the latest software available. Then I started with GS105Ev2 and thought that the process would be fairly similar but oh boy how wrong was I :D

The first difference was that it asked me to provide a TFTP server address and firmware file. I had no idea what that meant so time to start Googling. I found couple of articles ([1], [2]) but none of those gave the full solution for Mac OS. But through several trial and error tries I found the working way to upgrade the firmware. I've written down the steps for myself and for possible other people in trouble how to actually do this:

  • Download the latest firmware from Netgear site
  • Extract the downloaded .zip file
  • Download the MacTFTP Client
  • Connect your Mac and the GS105Ev2 switch directly to each other with a wired connection
  • Remove all other network cables from the GS105Ev2 switch
  • Power off and power on the GS105Ev2 switch
  • Configure your Mac to use a static ip address of 192.168.0.1 with netmask of 255.255.255.0 for the wired connection
  • Connect to the GS105Ev2 switch via web browser on address http://192.168.0.239 with password 'password' (this information also reads underneath the switch)
  • Head under Maintenance -> Firmware Upgrade and press 'Enter Loader mode'
  • After the loader mode has started change the URL manually to http://192.168.0.239/index.htm (for some reason I had to do this to get the switch to react to my firmware file upload)
  • Fire up the MacTFTP Client downloaded earlier
  • Select 'Send', use 192.168.0.239 as the address and 'password' as the password
  • Select the file by browsing it with the 'File...' functionality and click 'Start'
  • Wait for a minute for the upload to complete and then for some (several) minutes for the switch to update and reboot itself
  • Then connect to http://192.168.0.239 and it will ask you to upload the -VB.bin bootloader update file
  • Wait for the process to complete and check that your switch firmware has been updated
  • Profit!

Hopefully this eases the upgrade path for someone else as I spent some fair amount of time yesterday figuring out this :)