Best way to upgrade

What is the best way to upgrade?
I've run two upgrades in the past and both take DNS offline because my packages are not part of the upgrade. Then I've had to navigate to, via IP address, to openwrt downloads to get the packages my router expects.

I've tried the attended sys upgrade package but that has yet to work.

Is there any easier upgrade path? Am I doing something wrong?

Yeah, I had the same issues. A lot of people will tell you to not preserve your configuration and apply it from scratch, which is not all that fun. One challenge that is easy to miss during any upgrade is that the new code is often not backwards compatible with the old config, so new changes in OpenWrt need to be somehow merged into the existing config files, which a tedious manual process.

What I found works for me and several routers I manage is:

  1. Use Image Builder and create one firmware file with all the packages you need.
  2. Use /etc/uci-defaults to fully configure each router with their own settings.

Item (1) takes care of all the packages while (2) makes sure that my configuration is merged into the base line config so that it picks up all the latest.

Both require a time investment up-front; especially (2) to write your scripts and test them.

Yes, seems like two issues:

  1. a concern about upgrading and config compatibility of certain settings between versions; and
  2. how services run when their respective packages are not present/installed

As a solution for No. 2:

  • You can use imagebuilder to make a firmware with your packages included
  • Setup a cron scrip or scheduled tasks after upgrade to:
opkg update
opkg install foo foo2 fooetc
touch /etc/banner
reboot
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