Ubiquiti LiteBeam 5AC firmware installation challenge - SOLVED

Addendum:  I have been informed that some of the LBEs had different flash chips, something that will be addressed in a future version of the code. Since I sent my inaccessible LBE back via RMA and was sent a new unit in return, it is possible that I just got lucky this time around with the replacement's flash chip. All I would advise is that if you get to "step 3" in my original posting, where the wifi "mesh 2" network is the only option you have for accessing the unit. Follow step 3 in my follow-on posting to see if you can get access via ethernet.  That could be the deciding factor in whether the firmware update is successful or not.

Hope this helps someone out there, 73s
Clinton
KE6YOH
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I am happy to announce that I have successfully flashed a LiteBeam 5AC.  I can't pinpoint exactly what I did different but here are the three things that differed from the steps I initially documented below.  I hope this helps:

1. I used the latest nightly build instead of the latest stable release (thanks for the suggestion, Orv)
2. After reverting to Ubiquiti firmware 8.7.4 I performed a factory reset on the device. I doubt this helped anything but am including it here for completeness.
3. When I found myself in the same state as described below as #3, I DID NOT continue by connecting to the mesh 2 wifi hotspot as I did previously. Instead I disabled my wifi adapter. Then I power cycled the LiteBeam and disabled/enabled my ethernet adapter.  After this my ethernet adapter was given the ip address of 192.168.1.24 from the LiteBeam and everything else in the installation instructions worked fine.


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I purchased a LiteBeam and went through the instructions on the AREDN site for the 5AC Gen 2. I -=may=- have bricked it, so I purchased another one and -=may=- have bricked that one too.  So before I take it any further I wanted to see if anything glaring stands out in my actions when installing the aredn firmware on this unit.
 

1. I followed the “Ubiquiti 802.11ac First Install Process” instructions on the AREDN docs step-by-step.  My unit would not be downgraded to 8.7.0, the instructions went on to note that 8.7.4 should be used, so that is what I installed.
2. I followed the instructions to upload the firmware, selecting the factory AREDN .bin for the unit.
3. When the unit was available again, I was not able to connect to it via my wired ethernet port but I noticed a wireless network called something like “mesh 2” so I connected to that wireless network and was able to get to set the node name and admin password.
4. The unit initiated a reboot and noted that the address would be 10.48.11.41 after the reboot.
5. The “mesh 2” wifi network disappeared during the reboot.

 To this point everything seemed to run as expected. But after the reboot I am not able to connect to the node. My laptop doesn’t get a DHCP address, I’ve tried to hard-code an address in 192.168.1.0, I’ve tried choosing an address in the 10.48.11 that the aredn software said would be used after reboot, and I’ve used pktmon on windows to dump packets from the ethernet device and do not see any traffic other than my laptop. And the reset buttons on the dish and on the PoE unit don’t seem to be working.