Upgrade firmware without downtime?

[ladra]

Hello,

I found out yesterday that you can't use a backup config from another N66U even when they have identical firmware, in my case Tomato Shibby v108 64k.

I wanted to upgrade one of the N66U from v104 to v108, with minimum downtime. The v104 is being used 24/7 at a condo like complex with 30+ users and the v108 is for someone else(borrowed). I figured I'll configure the v108 with my settings then backup the config, upgrade the v104(live unit) to v108, then load the backup from the first v108. This way I'll be down less than 10 minutes...

I found out the hard way that you can not use a backup config from a different N66u. So what is the best way to upgrade the firmware with minimum downtime? It takes me about an hour or so to configure the settings from scratch(vlan, vwifi, qos, dhcp reservation, etc) and I prefer not to be down for so long.

I'm curious as to how others upgrade the firmware on a live N66U? Thanks in advance for you input.

 

[RMerlin]

Hello,

I found out yesterday that you can't use a backup config from another N66U even when they have identical firmware, in my case Tomato Shibby v108 64k.

I wanted to upgrade one of the N66U from v104 to v108, with minimum downtime. The v104 is being used 24/7 at a condo like complex with 30+ users and the v108 is for someone else(borrowed). I figured I'll configure the v108 with my settings then backup the config, upgrade the v104(live unit) to v108, then load the backup from the first v108. This way I'll be down less than 10 minutes...

I found out the hard way that you can not use a backup config from a different N66u. So what is the best way to upgrade the firmware with minimum downtime? It takes me about an hour or so to configure the settings from scratch(vlan, vwifi, qos, dhcp reservation, etc) and I prefer not to be down for so long.

I'm curious as to how others upgrade the firmware on a live N66U? Thanks in advance for you input.

Plug a USB disk, then export a text version of all your settings. Assuming the disk is mounted under sda1:

nvram show > /mnt/sda1/output.txt

You will get a bunch of settings (most of them are irreleavant to you, as they deal with low-level/HW stuff). Keep an eye for the interesting settings, such as this one:

dhcp_staticlist="xxxxx"

You can manually import one entry on the new router this way:

nvram set dhcp_staticlist="xxxxx"
(etc...)
nvram commit

For post people, manually importing 6 or 7 of these lines will cover the majority of the complex settings.

Configure the router by having one computer connected directly to it. Once you are done configuring it, only then unplug the old router, and put the new one instead.

You can't have both connected together at the same time, as you will have conflicts (same IPs, two DHCPs on the same network segment, etc...).

 

[TonyH]

Hmm,
I upgrade on the fly and never bother with config. Only thing I do is clearing NVRAM via Telnet after upgrade is finished. Never experienced a problem for long time with many diffrent routers.