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OpenWRT is amazing, it's a regular Linux on consumer-level routing hardware. I kinda feels a bit like a BSD in some design decisions. A pain point in upgrading

OpenWRT is amazing, it's a regular Linux on consumer-level routing hardware. I kinda feels a bit like a BSD in some design decisions. A pain point in upgrading the OS is that packages that were previously installed need to be reinstalled. In my case, this includes `dnsmasq-full`, which is dnsmasq with DNSSEC support and a few other features that are enabled in the regular `dnsmasq` package that comes by default. So after an update, there's not even DNS/DHCP in my local network. I need to configure static IPs, SSH into the device, and start reconfiguring it. I keep very tidy notes on how to reconfigure from scratch, so it's not a big deal, but I really shouldn't need to do this on every OS update. Having to do this leads me to just sticking to a very close-to-default configuration, because any customisation will result in more issues upgrading next time. It's improving though, this upgrade was smoother. Or maybe I just keep better notes?

josteink 4y ago
> A pain point in upgrading the OS is that packages that were previously installed need to be reinstalled. Which when you start having lots of OpenWRT based devices kinda gets a pain. And we hackers we solve pains, don't we? ;) So when a new OpenWRT release hits the market, I usually just have to update the OpenWRT release-number at the top of my makefile, and Github builds all the images for all my devices, with all the packages and customizations I already have in place. All devices upgraded in less than 30 minutes. My setup, for those interested: https://github.com/josteink/openwrt-build/ https://github.com/josteink/openwrt-build/
orev 4y ago
On the firmware download page, there’s a link you can expand to “customize image”. You can add more packages there and get a single image with everything included. You’ll still want to backup your config beforehand, as sometimes new releases need more space so the config partition is wiped out. But that’s still much easier to restore afterwards. Or you might also use the “attended sysupgrade” process which takes care of the firmware update directly from the device.

josteink 4y ago

> A pain point in upgrading the OS is that packages that were previously installed need to be reinstalled. Which when you start having lots of OpenWRT based devices kinda gets a pain. And we hackers we solve pains, don't we? ;) So when a new OpenWRT release hits the market, I usually just have to update the OpenWRT release-number at the top of my makefile, and Github builds all the images for all my devices, with all the packages and customizations I already have in place. All devices upgraded in less than 30 minutes. My setup, for those interested: https://github.com/josteink/openwrt-build/ https://github.com/josteink/openwrt-build/

orev 4y ago

On the firmware download page, there’s a link you can expand to “customize image”. You can add more packages there and get a single image with everything included. You’ll still want to backup your config beforehand, as sometimes new releases need more space so the config partition is wiped out. But that’s still much easier to restore afterwards. Or you might also use the “attended sysupgrade” process which takes care of the firmware update directly from the device.