openwrt-upgrade

openwrt-upgrade.md

Upgrading old OpenWrt system on my backup router

Quick status update on OpenWrt

• https://lwn.net/Articles/686767/
• https://openwrt.org/#announcing_the_openwrtlede_merge

Status of my router

My device: TL-WR741ND v4.25, Atheros AR9330 rev 1 (via /proc/cpuinfo)

Old OpenWrt version: Barrier Breaker, 2014-06-15 (bleeding edge), firstboot setup done, next step "init setup" hasn't been started.

Command opkg list-changed-conffiles confirms this:

/etc/shadow
/etc/config/system
/etc/config/dhcp
/etc/dropbear/* keys

New version

Suggested version:

• current stable: LEDE 17.01.4 (via https://openwrt.org/)
• 17.01.4 (via table in https://openwrt.org/toh/start)

See the release:

• https://openwrt.org/releases/17.01/notes-17.01.4
• https://openwrt.org/releases/17.01/changelog-17.01.4
• https://downloads.lede-project.org/releases/17.01.4/targets/

Upgrade path

Based on:

• https://openwrt.org/docs/user-guide/sysupgrade.cli
• https://openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-wr741nd#upgrading_openwrt

we need to:

• use ar71xx directory, images with tl-wr741nd-v4 in it's name
• use -sysupgrade.bin file(s)
• download the file into /tmp/ on the router (which is in ram)

So:

$ wget https://downloads.lede-project.org/releases/17.01.4/targets/ar71xx/generic/lede-17.01.4-ar71xx-generic-tl-wr741nd-v4-squashfs-sysupgrade.bin
$ cat lede-17.01.4-ar71xx-generic-tl-wr741nd-v4-squashfs-sysupgrade.bin.sha256 
286a7fbad37d2b2c509261d03a22762dfbf373eee9a7ae09a32a939e7a4f542b  lede-17.01.4-ar71xx-generic-tl-wr741nd-v4-squashfs-sysupgrade.bin
$ cat lede-17.01.4-ar71xx-generic-tl-wr741nd-v4-squashfs-sysupgrade.bin.md5 
65775564457221ae51b455e9b9aa89fa  lede-17.01.4-ar71xx-generic-tl-wr741nd-v4-squashfs-sysupgrade.bin

Pushed the files to the router via scp and run sysupgrade -v -n /tmp/*.bin.

Using -n option, all the setup was cleaned, so ssh no longer worked, I have to use http://192.168.1.1/cgi-bin/luci and start over.

See also: https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-quick-start/factory_installation