Installing new firmware on a Hak5 Packet Squirrel

A while back I acquired a Hak5 Packet Squirrel to experiment with but at the time the firmware (1.0) was still sort of weak and had issues. I recently decided to give it a go again since there's newer firmware (2.0) out. The problem I had is that here are there instructions:

Firmware Upgrades

From time to time the Packet Squirrel may be updated with new firmware to add features and
security improvements. It is highly recommended that you keep your Packet Squirrel up to date with the
latest firmware. To install the latest firmware:

1. Download the upgrade file. Make sure that the filename is upgrade-version.bin (where version is the firmware version, e.g. 1.2) and check that the SHA-256 sum matches.
2. Copy the upgrade file to the root of an NTFS or EXT4 formatted USB flash drive. Do not rename, unpack or otherwise alter this file.
3. Plug the USB drive into the powered-off Packet Squirrel
4. Flip the Packet Squirrel payload select switch to Arming mode (far right, closest to the USB flash drive)
5. Power on the Packet Squirrel from a reliable USB power source. This process takes 5-10 minutes and will be indicated by a series of LED lights. Do not power-off or otherwise interrupt the device until the flashing process completes.

During the firmware flashing process, the LED will indicate the following states:

1. Green flashing – booting up
2. Red/Blue alternating – beginning firmware flash
3. Solid Red or Blue – firmware flash in progress
4. Green flashing – rebooting
5. Blue flashing – upgrade complete, arming mode ready

Note that part that says it needs to be NTFS or EXT4 and as I discovered it really does have to be that. I tried ExFAT, FAT and even EXT2, none of them worked, oh well. Why did I try those and not NTFS? Simple: I'm a Mac user.

After digging around I tried to install Paragon, which failed to install, tried the Brew port of e2fs-progs as well as the NTFS-3G FUSE driver via Brew as well. None of them would do NTFS (write) or EXT4 so I just stuck the USB key in one of my Linux servers, here's the process.

(Note that your USB flash disk will likely NOT be sdf, use fdisk -l to see what it actually is. It's usually sdc).

1. fdisk /dev/sdf
2. Delete the partition and create a new Linux one, use the defaults for the size
3. Write that out and exit fdisk
4. mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdf1
5. mount /dev/sdf1 /mnt
6. cp upgrade-2.0.bin /mnt
7. umount /mnt

Plug that into the Squirrel and wait for the blinky blinky to stop, at that point it's done and RTG. No idea why I didn't do that to start with, it took a total of 5 minutes. Oh well, I now know 5 ways to NOT format NTFS or EXT4 on a Mac.

FYI, it took mine close to 20 minutes to flash up my squirrel, it's not the 5-10 they say. It's S L O W.