How to upgrade OpenWrt?

Hi, I am getting these errors
* Failed to download the package list
Failed to send request: Operation not allowed
My router model is: Xiaomi Mi Router 4A Gigabit Edition

Love OpenWRT but sadly I experiment a lot and now I'm in a boot loop (my own doing ofc)... But I don't know how to get out of it... I did a stable reflash, bought a 32GB USB stick, did a extroot (which worked like a treat!) and did something (now I can remember what) bad (installed something, not working or made a really bad config) and it sort of boot looped... booted, and restarted so and an on... So tried to get into failsafe mode (which worked) but with a really limited shell as (again probably the USB failed, which contained more then half the root dir) and with much limited commands I could do pretty much a "firstboot" and nothing else (still boot looped ofc)...
So where do I go from here... removing the USB is the only thing that gets you into failsafe shell, and with it in it just boot loops... Got drunk and mad formatted the USB (guessing it would go into more of a failsafe :-) but na same thing...

Maybe the onboard flash got crazy/corrupt but I don't think so... I think my extroot went haywire and sadly the onboard flash points to it.
Mount works, VI works, and reboot, firstboot but not much else...

I guess I can not TFTP flash it again (failsafe does not start a TFTP client?) what to do? is it semibricked? I'm sad.. and a bit drunk :-)

Just bought a belkin and following all your guides, can't thank you enough for such quality content!!!

Hi Marc, thanks for this excellent help. I want to upgrade from 19.07.7 to the latest stable build using the CLI. Would you recommend doing it step by step in major releases? So first to 21 and then to 22? Thanks in advance!

Hi Marc, Thank you for your guide. Does it work for snapshot firmware ? on Luci I got an error "Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'luci-app-attendedsysupgrade') "

Dear Marc, I am deeply impressed about the quality of this video!!! You gave me the knowledge to contol my OpenWRT update process !!! Absolutely great job !!!

Wow! I haven't done any software upgrades in a very long time because it was so difficult. This made it much easier! Thank you Marc, you helped me get updated!

Marc, super duper video
Thanks for making it.

Hi Marc, Thanks for your video. Can you please make a video on installing crowdsec and corwdsec firewall bouncer on openwrt for X86 system. It will be a great help for us all

Hi marc, how to install openwrt to ubiquiti M5 AC Lite ?

Thanks Marc. Great video. No need to go through build-root anymore.
Recently I installed Openwrt on few devices including Lanner fw-7525. Everything on openwrt now very polished than few years back. The time I was using it on my TP-1043ND V1 :)

Yes! Please do a video on openwrt server build

Love the channel! Have you used openwisp? As I am bound to use unifi at work, so it's nice to manage from a central point...

Your videos are definetly cool! Thaks!

Thanks, Marc. Your videos about OpenWrt are extremely useful for me.

Link mati Om

I've just used this to update my RT3200 - thank you!

Sir, Can you make a complete video on How to use band steering/ simultaneous dual band on Openwrt?

Amazing tutorials in just 20 minutes, awesome!

I really love your videos

Very useful. I haven't used OpenWRT very long and have been wiping in between. Going forward, I'll be more sophisticated in my approach. Thanks to you!

Very useful. I haven't used OpenWRT very long and have been wiping in between. Going forward, I'll be more sophisticated in my approach. Thanks to you!

Attended SysUpgrade worked great on my Raspberry Pi except for one thing. I have OpenWRT installed to a 32GB EXT4 partition, and after upgrading, the partition shrunk to a tiny one. I did a poweroff of OpenWRT, then popped the microSD card into a linux box and resized the partition using fdisk, e2fsck and resize2fs. I wish this was built into Attended SysUpgrade, but it still saves time. Thanks for the video!

Hi Marc, very well explained and highlighted. Many thanks for that. Although I have one question left. My current openwrt version 19. Can I use your procedure to execute the upgrade?

oh man, I learned a lot from you, I really appreciate your efforts and deep explaining, man thanks again and again 👍🏻

Thats a great guide and a very useful way to save time on upgrades! My only question is, how to upgrade between different major releases. I was able to upgrade from 21.02.1 to .5, but I can't seem to find an upgrade path to 22. Is it possible?

When upgrading from LEDE 17 to OpenWRT 22 should I use the sysupgrade image or the initramfs image?

Great video as all the others.
Are you working on the RPI + Switch + Wi-Fi AP as OpenWRT router? That would be awesome.

Hey Marc, I really like the OpenWRT Mesh series and I'm working one one for my own. Since I have a Ubiquiti router for the uplink that is not fully supported by OpenWRT, I had to modify the OpenWRT source a bit to get my own image. For that I'm really interested in a video, which explains how I can host my own Image Selector that builds the desired images in the background. Maybe you want to make such a video :-)

Loved all your videos so far, very clear instructions! Appreciate all the work that also goes in to making the screen recordings of all the steps.

I'm probably gonna have to build a custom firmware for my router again for update to include specific memory offset patch for WiFi on my netgear r6850

Wow, I learned some new things.

You earned yourself a subscriber. Love from Kerala.

If a Openwrt is using an old package from 2017, how do i update the source for that one package to the latest?

Merci

i noticed that, using firmware selector to make a custom build, doesn't contain luci....i am running openwrt on archer a7v5 and the official package contains luci webui, but if i create a custom build and add/remove some packages, luci is not there in that list by default.....this makes me wonder, what other packages are skipped...is there some info in docs related to this?

Awesome video Mark. Thank you. I just built a x86/64 openwrt on HP T620+. Tried updating using both auc and luci attended SysUpgrade but I am getting error "Bad Message (74) on Auc and "Cound not connect to API" on Luci. running 22.03.1 - r19777-2853b6d652. Update: I tried 15 hours later and it worked. All updated nicely. I did have to resize the root partition again. Looks like there was some glitch on sysupgrade server that got sorted out overnight.

Bien, j'ai presque tout compris

hi Marc... such a good pack of information...
and some good and objective data about the use of squashfs and overlay...
?wouldn't be better to use casper to avoid the extra partition... and could have a dynamic size of the 'writable' part??

Hi Marc I’m trying to install NordVPN and having trouble nothing out there is step by step I’m a noob lol can u send me or point me in the right direction thank you

Thank you so much! That LuCi attended upgrade tool should come standard!

Thank you, what a time saver!

Hi.. how about the interface and vlan that i made from the old version. if i upload a new version of firmware is there a possibility that will lost also?

Thanks Marc for providing this guide, and obviously to the folks at openwrt for providing and amazing distro. I just upgraded an x86_64 router with the attended sysupgrade package and it worked perfectly!

Granted, it was only from a 21.x build, but instead of hours of drudgery it took less than five minutes.

As you like to say: Awesome!

Hi Marc! I have a special HW configuration with OpenWrt. My TP-Link router does not have enough storage space, so I connected a CF card via USB, and the overlay partition is on it. I would like to carry out the attendend sysupgrade, but I don't know that it will also work with the CF card? Do you perhaps have experience with this or give any advice? Thank you in advance!

As usual, very well explained. This is one of the topics I would like to have a deep dive and thanks for your effort, Marc. By the way, I have two very short questions. I am using Raspberry Pi 4 as a home router and using SQUASHFS as the filesystem. What is the right filesystem for the Raspberry Pi with SD cards? SQUASHFS or EXT4? After installing the OpenWRT on the SD card, I have to manually resize the filesystem to make use of all available space. Is there any better alternative for this approach? I am eagerly waiting to see a video on the topic of installing OpenWRT on Raspberry Pi.

Hello Marc. Like your videos. Question on this LUCI software upgrades. I went to the upgrade tab and went thru each file needing upgrade but except for upgrading individual files it did not install the 22.03 openwrt software. So how can i do this short of imaging the sd card all over again. I am using this as a travel router and the only files on it are the configured files needed for the added wlan adapter and vpn. I am interested in 22.03 to see if it supports AC1200 usb wireless adapters, etc.

Thank you so much for highlighting this simple path to upgrading OpenWRT, it was so painless! If ASU run from the CLI, unlike in LuCi, you get to see all the packages that are updated. I'm also using the Belkin 3200 via snapshot and was dreading having to reflash everything, get all the correct packages, etc, in order to properly update. Absolute lifesaver