Update router and firmware

RouterOS General
1

Hi all,

When there is an update available for the router, i first update the routerOS to the latest stable version.
Then i reboot.
After that, in Routerboard menu (in winbox) i upgrade firmware.
And i reboot again.

This may seems trivial questions but here they are :

  1. Is it the good/best way to upgrade the router ?
  2. Why do i have to upgrade RouterOS and the firmware, so 2 reboot for each new version ? In fact, what is the difference between routerOS update and firmware upgrade ?
2
  1. yes
    You can set /system routerboard settings set auto-upgrade=yes to skip the need for manually upgrade the routerboot (firmware) … second reboot is still necessary though.
    .
  2. Routerboot is much like UEFI or BIOS: gets executed first thing after power-up, does basic hardware setup and loads and executes (much more complex) OS kernel
    RouterOS is OS, much like Linux or Windows. After it gets run by Routerboot, it takes care of additional hardware setup (e.g. switch chip settings) and actually performs router tasks.

Both are pretty independent of each other apart form some little things involved when routerboot loads routeros kernel.

Due to how little impact of routerboot on device performance it is most of time safe to skip the routerboot upgrade … in fact changes are seldom and changes almost never happen for mature devices (i.e. devices which are a couple of years on the market). So what I usually do: upgrade ROS as usual, perform routerboot upgrade but then I don’t do the second reboot. My experience is that this “pending for second reboot” state is just fine, even power outage doesn’t make any harm.

Why 2 reboots: new routerboot is packed with (already running!) routeros … so routerboot can’t be upgraded at the same time as routeros because new routerboot is not available at the time of loading newer routeros. There was a discussion on this forum about the ways of upgrading routerboot but seems like MT doesn’t want to change the way it’s done currently.

3

Hi Mkx,

This is very clear :slight_smile:
Thank you !