OpenWRT dist-upgrade, or how to update your OpenWRT automatically

I've been thinking in writing this post for a long time and with OpenWRT 21.02 hopefully coming I thought it was the perfect time so that you could benefit from it.

Those of us who run Debian love the way you can go from one version to the new one (Bullseye is coming this weekend, btw) without needing to reinstall the machine each time you update, a simple apt dist-upgrade will take care of everything.

I love Debian, but for the really small things I enjoy OpenWRT a lot and I've always missed the Debian dist-upgrade way of things on OpenWRT.

At work we have a lot of OpenWRT routers, so we had a quite automated way of managing things, so that when we had to update, we did the sysupgrade and then logged on the machine and executed something that installed back all the extra things we needed. It was then that I though... hey, what if we use the sysupgrade.conf thing to protect a service that would be run on the first boot of the device with the new version of OpenWRT and then this service would install all the packages we need?

And that's how the reinstall script (calling it a service would be too much) was born. This script will take care of reinstalling all the things that you tell him to install after a sysupgrade, so, all you need to do is to identify what extra packages you have installed and write the names on your /etc/reinstall.conf file, one package per line, also, if you want a service disabled, you would write its name prepending it with a "-", and that's it.

The only limitation that I've found that would annoy me is that reinstall needs network connection to work, so... if you need some of the extra packages to stablish the network connection (like a 4G connected router wich needs its drivers, a full wpa client to connect with WPA-EAP, ...), reinstall will fail, I suppose I could give an option to predownload the packages but that would need the target version of OpenWRT, so maybe that would mean that maybe reinstall should download the sysupgrade image itself along with the packages and launch the sysupgrade, ... well, who knows, maybe I end up writing a beast, but right now... it needs to be able to have network connection with OpenWRT out of the box to be able to reinstall

This is a /etc/reinstall.conf of one of my machines which runs as an AP, so I don't want dhcp or other stuff, but I want some extra packages to be able to access external storage and things like that:

-dnsmasq -uhttpd -odhcpd nmap diffutils usbutils kmod-usb-storage

BTW: this AP of mine is an ASL26555 with 16MB of RAM which has just been updated from the 19.07 series to 21.02.0-rc4 using reinstall without any problem.

So... you need the reinstall.conf file and we need the script itself, which is at the end of the post, you must save it as /etc/init.d/reinstall and then do a "chmod 755 /etc/init.d/reinstall", but as I told before... we must setup sysupgrade so that reinstall survives after it, so you must add to /etc/sysupgrade.conf at least the three reinstall lines that I have here on this example so that it ends looking something like this:

## This file contains files and directories that should ## be preserved during an upgrade. /etc/firewall.user /etc/crontabs/root /root /etc/init.d/reinstall /etc/rc.d/S99reinstall /etc/reinstall.conf

So... now you have it all setup... when you are going to do a sysupgrade... you must first do a "/etc/init.d/reinstall enable" in order to enable the service, so that it runs when sysupgrade reboots the device, that's when reinstall installs the wanted packages.

The service will log its actions on /root/reinstall.log by default, then disable itself so that it is not run anymore, and then reboot the machine so that it ends up right how you wanted it to be. After that you can log on the machine to see how everything went, and hopefully your log will look something like this:

_______ ________ __ | |.-----.-----.-----.| | | |.----.| |_ | - || _ | -__| || | | || _|| _| |_______|| __|_____|__|__||________||__| |____| |__| W I R E L E S S F R E E D O M ----------------------------------------------------- OpenWrt 21.02.0-rc4, r16256-2d5ee43dc6 ----------------------------------------------------- Downloading 'http://www.google.com' Connecting to 142.250.185.4:80 Writing to '/dev/null' Download completed (14036 bytes) Thu Aug 12 17:29:39 CEST 2021 Downloading https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/21.02.0-rc4/targets/ramips/rt305x/packages/Packages.gz Updated list of available packages in /var/opkg-lists/openwrt_core Downloading https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/21.02.0-rc4/targets/ramips/rt305x/packages/Packages.sig Signature check passed. Downloading https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/21.02.0-rc4/packages/mipsel_24kc/base/Packages.gz Updated list of available packages in /var/opkg-lists/openwrt_base Downloading https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/21.02.0-rc4/packages/mipsel_24kc/base/Packages.sig Signature check passed. Downloading https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/21.02.0-rc4/packages/mipsel_24kc/luci/Packages.gz Updated list of available packages in /var/opkg-lists/openwrt_luci Downloading https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/21.02.0-rc4/packages/mipsel_24kc/luci/Packages.sig Signature check passed. Downloading https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/21.02.0-rc4/packages/mipsel_24kc/packages/Packages.gz Updated list of available packages in /var/opkg-lists/openwrt_packages Downloading https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/21.02.0-rc4/packages/mipsel_24kc/packages/Packages.sig Signature check passed. Downloading https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/21.02.0-rc4/packages/mipsel_24kc/routing/Packages.gz Updated list of available packages in /var/opkg-lists/openwrt_routing Downloading https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/21.02.0-rc4/packages/mipsel_24kc/routing/Packages.sig Signature check passed. Downloading https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/21.02.0-rc4/packages/mipsel_24kc/telephony/Packages.gz Updated list of available packages in /var/opkg-lists/openwrt_telephony Downloading https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/21.02.0-rc4/packages/mipsel_24kc/telephony/Packages.sig Signature check passed. Disabling -dnsmasq Disabling -uhttpd Disabling -odhcpd Installing nmap Installing nmap (7.80-3) to root... Downloading https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/21.02.0-rc4/packages/mipsel_24kc/packages/nmap_7.80-3_mipsel_24kc.ipk Installing libpcap1 (1.9.1-3) to root... Downloading https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/21.02.0-rc4/packages/mipsel_24kc/base/libpcap1_1.9.1-3_mipsel_24kc.ipk Installing libstdcpp6 (8.4.0-3) to root... Downloading https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/21.02.0-rc4/targets/ramips/rt305x/packages/libstdcpp6_8.4.0-3_mipsel_24kc.ipk Installing zlib (1.2.11-3) to root... Downloading https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/21.02.0-rc4/packages/mipsel_24kc/base/zlib_1.2.11-3_mipsel_24kc.ipk Installing libpcre (8.44-3) to root... Downloading https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/21.02.0-rc4/packages/mipsel_24kc/base/libpcre_8.44-3_mipsel_24kc.ipk Configuring libpcre. Configuring libpcap1. Configuring libstdcpp6. Configuring zlib. Configuring nmap. Installing diffutils Installing diffutils (3.7-3) to root... Downloading https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/21.02.0-rc4/packages/mipsel_24kc/packages/diffutils_3.7-3_mipsel_24kc.ipk Configuring diffutils. Installing usbutils Installing usbutils (013-2) to root... Downloading https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/21.02.0-rc4/packages/mipsel_24kc/packages/usbutils_013-2_mipsel_24kc.ipk Installing librt (1.1.24-3) to root... Downloading https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/21.02.0-rc4/targets/ramips/rt305x/packages/librt_1.1.24-3_mipsel_24kc.ipk Installing libusb-1.0-0 (1.0.24-4) to root... Downloading https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/21.02.0-rc4/packages/mipsel_24kc/base/libusb-1.0-0_1.0.24-4_mipsel_24kc.ipk Installing libevdev (1.10.1-1) to root... Downloading https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/21.02.0-rc4/packages/mipsel_24kc/packages/libevdev_1.10.1-1_mipsel_24kc.ipk Installing libudev-zero (0.4.5-2) to root... Downloading https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/21.02.0-rc4/packages/mipsel_24kc/packages/libudev-zero_0.4.5-2_mipsel_24kc.ipk Installing usbids (0.347-1) to root... Downloading https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/21.02.0-rc4/packages/mipsel_24kc/packages/usbids_0.347-1_mipsel_24kc.ipk Configuring libevdev. Configuring librt. Configuring libusb-1.0-0. Configuring libudev-zero. Configuring usbids. Configuring usbutils. Installing kmod-usb-storage Installing kmod-usb-storage (5.4.137-1) to root... Downloading https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/21.02.0-rc4/targets/ramips/rt305x/packages/kmod-usb-storage_5.4.137-1_mipsel_24kc.ipk Installing kmod-scsi-core (5.4.137-1) to root... Downloading https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/21.02.0-rc4/targets/ramips/rt305x/packages/kmod-scsi-core_5.4.137-1_mipsel_24kc.ipk Configuring kmod-scsi-core. Configuring kmod-usb-storage. Everything went Ok, reinstall has finished without errors.

I guess, that's all I have to say, hope you enjoy it, keep in mind that embedded devices are always tricky and that if your machine is not stable... you should probably not do automatic things like this on it, as always I take no resposability on anything, use it at your own risk, as for me, I trust OpenWRT so much that I have just reinstalled my ASL26555 from outside using it and everything went Ok ;-)

So... here is reinstall

Edit: Originally I had pasted the code in the page, but that was an error due to how bad blogger works, so... now I have published it on github and added the link to it. Also a quick note... reinstall can also be run or rerun after the machine is upgraded if you forgot to enable it before the sysupgrade or if something went wrong, like conectivity problems or similar, simply do:

/etc/init.d/reinstall start