Clone a ea6350 v3

i've used a linksys ea6350 v3 for a few years with no problems
i acquired a second ea6350 v3
i would like to clone the running machine to the new one
why - just because
is this doable or just plain dumb

You can copy most of the configs - minus things like MAC addresses. "Cloning" makes little to no sense. Improperly doing so can also brick your device or make things like WiFi unstable/unusable.

Can you explain why just installing Openwrt (and possible copying the config after) on the 2nd device won't suit your use case?

Also see: Sync settings between 2 OpenWrt devices

If that is the same product you can same firmware for old device

Disconnect old to network
Start he new device
Install this old firmware
Reboot and change name , ip, ...

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that's works great to setup a new device
i've done that
i haven't cloned a device
i would like to learn how to do that

I recently had a similar situation, also with a Linksys unit. Here's what I ended up doing. A word of caution: I didn't have anything complicated on the device. Were I running, say, Samba, I am not sure how well this method would have worked.

Anyway, on the old device, I did:

sysupgrade -k -b /root/myconfig.tar.gz

This creates an archive file myconfig.tar.gz with all configuration files AND a list of installed packages. Save this file to your computer.

The list of packages is stored in a text file within the archive:

/etc/backup/installed_packages.txt

Each line in the file consists of a package name, a tab character, and a word, which can be either rom or overlay. Packages that are marked rom came with the firmware; those marked overlay are the ones that were installed separately. (Come to think of it, this may be implementation-specific; overlay is something that SquashFS has, and I don't have an ext4 device close at hand to check how it works there.) Anyway, at least on a SquashFS system, you will have a list of "add-on" packages. So you can make a copy of this file and use it as a base for an installation script.

Let's say you only have two overlay lines:

luci-app-advanced-reboot	overlay
luci-theme-openwrt-2020 	overlay

Based on this, you can write a simple install script:

opkg update && opkg install luci-app-advanced-reboot luci-theme-openwrt-2020

Note that I deliberately wrote everything on one long line, so I can copy it from the text file, paste it into the command line in the terminal, and run all of it at once.

Now you're ready to fire up the new device:

  1. Install OpenWrt.
  2. Install the additional packages using the install script you wrote earlier.
  3. Reconfigure the device using the backup configuration file you created in the beginning. You can do it in LuCI or you can upload the file to the device via SCP and run:

    sysupgrade -r myconfig.tar.gz
     
  4. Reboot.

I'll be the first to tell you this is kinda janky. But it worked for me in a pinch...

You could install luci-app-attendedsysupgrade then get an image from the server. Use that to flash the new device. This will include all the packages from your current device.

You can then get a backup archive with all your settings and restore it to the new device.

Both should be identical now minus the device specific things like Mac address etc.

luci-app-attendedsysupgrade returns error
i can open chef.libremesh.org in firefox with no problem

luci-app-attendedsysupgrade_error

update: if i use lynx to access https://chef.libremesh.org from the route i get a bad certificate error

SSL error:host(chef.libremesh.org)!=cert(CN<kleverspace.net>:SAN<DNS=forum.kleverspace.net>:SAN<DNS=kleverspace.net>)-Continue? (n)

On mine the server is https://sysupgrade.openwrt.org

luci-app-attendedsysupgrade_error_2

What version of openwrt are you running on the device?

OpenWrt 19.07.3 r11063-85e04e9f46 / LuCI openwrt-19.07 branch git-20.136.49537-fb2f363

Ah that's out of support. You should really update to 22.03.3.

You could update using a normal upgrade image, install the packages you normally use using the package manager, then use luci-app-attendedsysupgrade to create a custom image with all the packages built in and flash that to your existing router and the new one. Then restore a config backup from the existing router to the new one.

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that's the plan
AFTER i have a working clone

That really confused me. Why would you wanna "clone" an old, unsupported version?

(Maybe a built 19 image could work? :thinking: )

Yea, I'm starting not to see the utility of this task.

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