Bug Reports

I've been in the process of upgrading machines from 1.3 to 1.31 and I've noticed that it's about a 50/50 chance that the upgrade will take. Some machines I try 2 or 3 times before it finally sticks.

This is what I've seen.

You upgrade a machine, it restarts. It still shows 1.3 (and the system gauges are not there, so I know it's still in version 1.3 and not the 1.31) after the restart, you try again, might take the next time or might not.

Never any errors when it *doesn't* work as it says it's installing and going to restart the machine. The machines all vary in type (from old Dell to Compaq to HP machines, different RAM sizes, NIC cards, HDD, etc.) so it doesn't seem to be common to any one type of hardware configuration.

Also, do the system gauges only show up if supported by m0n0wall or are they always suppose to show up no matter if the hardware can report those readings or not?

I just upgraded 2 generic PCs and 3 ALIX 1.3 firewalls to 1.31 and had no problems whatsoever.  The temp and voltage readings only show up on supported hardware.

Roy...

I'm glad to hear it isn't a wide spread problem, hopefully it's just my PC having a bad day. 
So far I've upgraded about 20 m0n0wall machines, about half of them took a few tries to get the upgrade to stick.

I'll keep a watch on this topic in case other people experience similar problems.

There seems to have been a bunch of people (including me) who can't get upgrades to "take" even though the whole process seems to run properly and there are no errors shown. In my case I can't get from 1.3b18 to 1.3 or 1.31. It looks like it works but leaves me on 1.3b18. This is on an Alix.

What I haven't tried is running the upgrade back to back to back to see if it finally works. Hang on...just tried it 4 times in a row but no joy.

Of course, my problem may not be related to yours at all.

Steve.

Well, I think there might be a connection though since you experience the same results. You load the upgrade, it says it's installed and about to reboot. Well, it does reboot, but it's left you at the same version.

My guess is that the image file is not making it all the way, so even though the message says "installing and rebooting", in the background it's really saying "failed" I'm certain.

I'm not sure, but I think m0n0wall does some kind of check on the image file to see if it's valid, then tries to install it. Either it's failing on the file check or installation. I'm guessing that if it was failing on the installation, you would be left with a hosed system that didn't boot. It would be obvious that installation failed midway then.

But, we both see a failure before the install process, so it just reboots the machine and you are back where you started. I guess I need to console up these machines and see what happens when it "fails", if the console has any errors to report. That might help us all to track down this nagging bug since back in the 1.3 beta days.

If I was having this problem, I'd manually download the image, verify the MD5 or SHA256 checksum, and attempt to install that image. If that fails.......

just updated two more generic and another alix and everything went fine.  however, one generic did list fan, temp and voltages but everything was listed as zero.

Roy...

If I was having this problem, I'd manually download the image, verify the MD5 or SHA256 checksum, and attempt to install that image. If that fails.......

Just did that, everything checks out fine. I'm not sure though if it's making to the m0n0wall machine intact, that might be the issue, but it's hard to tell at the moment.

One thing I will add though, at first I thought maybe it was the browser, as I was doing the upgrades from Firefox. I never had any issues before, so I did try some other browsers like Opera and Konqueror, but the results ended up being the same.

Mainly, 1 of 3 things would happen.
1) Upgrade goes through just fine
2) It says the upgrade was successful, but after restart, it's just back to the same version as before
3) This one happens from time to time, the web browser times out during the upload. That's why I started trying different web browsers as I thought that was the issue causing the problem. But so far, no matter which browser I try, sometimes during the file upload, the m0n0wall page spits back a timeout error

I'm using IE 8 and my upload speed is 2 mbits.

Roy...

I'm using IE 8 and my upload speed is 2 mbits.

Roy...

I do think the upload speed has some affect on it. But one system I upgrade over the LAN, upgrade failed (the one I use for my own office). I do another across the Internet at a 256K upload speed and well 5 minutes later, it's finally finished and upgrade works just fine.

I'll have to fire up a Virtual Box with Windows to test out the IE part or I do have a laptop with Windows XP I can experiment with.

Either way, I guess I'm the only one experiencing this issue in regards of going from 1.3 to 1.31 so far as I haven't seen anyone else post something about it yet. Though, I do have hundreds of m0n0wall machines to experiment with 

I imagine the  image is fine, not corrupt as it wouldn't work some times and not others, plus the upgrade script does a gzip check of the firmware and reports back if it's corrupt.

The first step would be to configure a separate syslog server and see do you catch an error before it reboots.

Alt. for the adventurous you could try a manual upgrade step by step and see where you get an error, the steps are in /etc/rc.firmware , or prevent it rebooting by renaming /etc/rc.reboot to something else during the test.  BUT you could end up with an unusable system, you have been warned

updated 3 more generic with no problems with the exception that one unit takes over 10 seconds to display the System Status page.  All other pages on that firewall display within a second.  BTW, this is an older PC and when the System page finally displays is does not show any of the new hardware fields.

Roy...

Sigh. You can forget my particular version of the problem. All this talk of checksums and unzipping made me realise what I was doing wrong. I was unzipping the image file before trying to do the firmware upgrade.

But...I didn't see any error messages on the serial port or in the web GUI.

Steve.