[Solved] Upgrade from older Bleeding Edge f/w to Current

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

Okay, I've been a bad admin. When I upgraded from my venerable WRT54G a few years ago, and bought a new Linksys EA3500, I promised myself I'd keep on top of the upgrades, which I'd never been good at before.

You can guess that didn't happen. So although in some ways I'm a greybeard, I need some newbie-ish advice.

My EA3500 is running: OpenWrt Designated Driver 50072 / LuCI Master (git-17.339.51318-de4c4b8)

    root@briar:/etc# cat openwrt_release 
    DISTRIB_ID='OpenWrt'
    DISTRIB_RELEASE='Bleeding Edge'
    DISTRIB_REVISION='50072'
    DISTRIB_CODENAME='designated_driver'
    DISTRIB_TARGET='kirkwood/generic'
    DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION='OpenWrt Designated Driver 50072'
    DISTRIB_TAINTS=''
    root@briar:/etc# cat openwrt_version 
    50072

This is 2 or 3 years old, and because it's a development release (that's what "Bleeding Edge" is, right?) I'm not sure what my options are.

Can I simply download and flash the 19.07.5 upgrade .bin file, and expect, or hope, that my config remains intact? (I'll have backups, of course.) Are there other steps I should take? Do I need to upgrade to 18.x, or some other intermediate firmware, first?

Also, I know that the EA3500 is a dual firmware device, but I'm unsure whether my current install knows about that, and if it will install to the alternate partition or not.

Many thanks in advance,
paul

2

Do that without keeping the settings.
Instead take a backup of the settings and use them as a guide when you reconfigure the device manually.

2 Likes
3

Ah, okay. That sounds like a good safety measure. Makes sense.

Can you tell me where my install falls, in terms of the major release cycle, so that if I find a problem with applying my old config, I can track down what sorts of things changed, from the release notes and commit logs?

4

Likely from late 2017, and from the abandoned original OpenWrt repo, mainly unupdated since 2016...

You are likely able to sysupgrade to new version, but as lots of defaults have changed since 2016, you should upgrade without settings and not restore them after flash. Better to recreate them by hand.

Read https://openwrt.org/toh/linksys/ea3500

2 Likes
5

Okay, it's unanimous -- I should treat this as a fresh install.

Is there a way to ask Luci for a configuration dump -- essentially a "print screen" for all of its config pages? I'll obviously have the raw config files, but having the "interpreted for the user" version available may be handy as well. If not, I guess I'll do printing myself before starting.

6

LuCI has no special own config. it only shows and manipulates the OpenWrt config files in /etc/config

You can easily generate a backup archive from the flashing page, and download the tar.gz file that contains the backuped settings. Can be opened with normal archive tools. Winrar, gzip, 7zip, whatever. Settings are normal text files.

1 Like
7

Yes, sorry -- I understand that Luci just displays what it gets from the config files. But it's exactly because it displays it very differently than the config files do that the screens it provides might be useful.

For instance, an empty checkbox in Luci shows something that isn't configured. If I install a new release and configure it, and that checkbox is now checked, I'll know that something crept into my config, perhaps because it was enabled by default, and that I should think harder about whether or not I want it on or not. But without the old Luci screens I might not notice it.

Thanks,
paul

8

In this case you can take another backup from the new device and compare the old and new configuration files for differences.
Moreover the names in the config files are very much the same as they appear in Luci, so that won't be much of a problem.

2 Likes
9

Good point. That's probably the best plan.

10

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