Jason White <jason@jasonjgw.net> writes:
A friend is in a similar position (though with cable and ADSL), and thinking that a small form-factor system capable of running a typical Linux distribution would be better than OpenWRT on consumer-grade hardware. Apparently, you can't upgrade OpenWRT in place from one release to another - you have to re-install, at least on some routers. That's annoying, to say the least.
In theory, sysupgrade works. What that basically does is take a tarball of "interesting" files, put them away somewhere, and then put them back after flashing the new firmware. A \n delimited list of files in /etc/ says what is "interesting". I did this to upgrade from backfire to aa on three APs recently, and it worked perfectly (to my immense surprise), on the second two where I added my one hostapd-patched file from /lib to the "interesting" list. The list of installed packages gets reset -- you'll need to remove luci again and install <whatever> again. But the allowed_keys file, for example, was kept by default. Also worth noting is that since its (usually) deployed as a ROM plus a COW, you can just diff e.g. /rom/etc and /etc to see what config you've changed. Obviously not nearly as pleasant as Debian, but the expectation is that you set these things up, then leave them alone for years. PS: I'm talking above about upgrades between major releases -- you can opkg update within a release fine, although frankly I'm usually too lazy and scared to risk it. (I can't estimate how realistic that risk is.)