The link came up at full capacity. 748 Mbps. The AF-5X on v3.7.11 was singing again. She locked both radios to the stable release, disabled automatic updates permanently, and added a note in the wiki: “Never trust a beta firmware on a backhaul you can’t touch.”
while true; do tftp -m binary 10.0.3.88 -c put AF5X-v3.7.11.bin -t 1 sleep 11.5 done On the tenth attempt, nothing. On the twenty-third, a single acknowledgment packet came back. The East radio had bitten. But the window was only 2.7 seconds. She watched the hex dump scroll—blocks 1 through 312 of the firmware uploading at 1 Mbps over the degraded control channel.
At block 289, the link wobbled. A snow squall had moved between the ridges. Packet loss hit 40%. The transfer stalled.
Marta didn’t panic. She switched from UDP to TCP-tunneled TFTP through the West radio’s management plane, sacrificing speed for reliability. The upload resumed. Block 312. Checksum valid.
Then the alert came at 2:47 AM.
