Thanks alastairstevenson for putting this together and sharing it. Great Work! I was able to use it on 4 of my 5 DS-2CD2532F-IWS running 5.3.0 cameras to get them to 5.4.5 with no issue.
The 5th camera has proven to be tricky though. It was in the middle of the bunch I so I am sure I have the process correct and the files being used are not corrupt.
The camera took the brickfixv2CH fine but unlike the others, it would not boot into Telnet mode or return a ping after. It has a serial number only a few digits off from the other cameras since they were all bought together so I would expect it to be the same CH grey market version, but I then tried the brickfixv2EN to see what happens. Still no telnet or ping. I tried both multiple times and
TFTP was always successful and never did a retry on any cameras, also tried two different computers.
I have some other firmware files from a couple years ago when I learned firmware updates can brick these cameras so I don't remember much about the firmware versions, but back then I was able to get the cameras to 5.3.0. The cameras are up high on a metal building, so I cant easily access them to look at the version sticker either
Then I used TFTP to load on each other firmware I have to see if it would boot into a GUI or return a ping other than the first few when it looks for a TFTP server. I loaded 5.1.6, 5.2.0, 5.2.5, 5.3.0, 5.3.0 downgrader, and 5.3.3. I had a subnet mask of 255.0.0.0, so I could do a -t ping on 192.0.0.64 and 192.168.1.64. Of all the firmware, only the downgrader gave a response to the ping and booted to the GUI and showed up as 5.2.5. All others except the 5.3.3 would just wait not return a ping but after 10 minutes showed up in SADP like normal for a firmware issue. The thing about 5.3.3 is that every 45sec or so it would return a few pings with a TTL-255 like it was rebooting. But it was like a soft reboot because the link light on my switch did not cycle like it does when rebooting.
Another thing I observed is that all my cameras that took correctly would pull in the brickfixv2CH package and then after I power cycled them they would reboot(Ethernet link cycled) 3 times before ending up in the telnet mode. This problematic camera only reboots twice, like it gets stuck on the 2nd part. I tried the brickfix2 firmware multiple times even after getting the camera to load using the 5.3.0 downgrader. Tried loading it through the GUI of the downgrader firmware, and through IVMS, but always the same result of no ping, telnet, GUI, or anything after loading either brickfixv2. The downgrader GUI actually would just get stuck each time trying to load firmware, not sure if it was a browser compatibility issue or what, but didn't think much of it.
I don't have a good way to make a direct serial connection to the camera at this time, but I have enabled the telnet and SSH when running the 5.3.0 downgrader and connected to it that way. Can I run some commands in the telnet or SSH console to investigate or resolve the issue?