Upgrading Firmware on a Ubiquiti Edgerouter Lite with SSH
The Ubiquiti Edgerouter Lite provides the ability to create a virtual LAN (vLAN) for $129 dollars. This is a quality VPN solution that was highly recommend from someone who owns a data center. Seriously… well worth the money.
Upgrading my router from firmware version 1.2 was difficult because there is a bug in the CURL library that causes it to fail when upgrading through the Web UI.
Version 1.2 has a bug in the curl library so uploading the firmware through the Web UI is not possible.

Connect to Ubiquiti Edgerouter
In this tutorial I will be connecting to the router through an Ethernet cable that is directly plugged into my laptop. Before I can access the administrative panel I must manually set my IP address on my Ethernet card to an IP in the subnet of the router or it will not connect.

Router Administrative URL
Default Login Credentials for Ubiquiti Edgerouter Lite
Login: ubnt
Pasword: ubnt
Upgrading Ubiquiti Edgerouter Lite’s firmware using SSH
At this point I assumed you’ve tried to update the firmware through the UI and it has failed.
Download firmware here: https://www.ui.com/download/edgemax/edgerouter-lite
The trick is to use SSH to update the firmware from version 1.2 to 1.3 to get past the CURL bug.
I wasn’t able to upgrade to any other versions of the firmware. I was only able to upgrade to 1.3. After I upgrade to 1.3 I didn’t have any issues upgrading to 1.97 using the web UI.
See link for more information about the issue I experienced
Connecting to Router with SSH
You can easily connect to the router using SSH. The login is your administrative account and password. Confirm you have access using the below SSH command to connect.
1 |
ssh ubnt@192.168.1.1 |
Secure Copy your image to the router’s /tmp/ folder
1 |
scp ER-e100.v1.3.0.4605130.tar ubnt@192.168.1.1:/tmp |
If this was successful then connect to the router to add the system image.
1 |
ssh ubnt@192.168.1.1 |
1 2 |
cd /tmp/ ls |
1 |
add system image ER-e100.v1.3.0.4605130.tar |

Voila! Your firmware has been upgraded.
The router will need to reboot shortly after the firmware has been updated. When it comes back up from the upgrade from version 1.2 to 1.3 you can log in and use the Web UI to upgrade to any version you like. I read that version 2 had bugs in it so I went with version 1.97.

Useful Links
https://help.ubnt.com/hc/en-us/articles/205146110-EdgeRouter-Upgrading-EdgeOS-firmware