Merlin upgrade long jump

[FTC]

Hi, I am writing this thread as a reference for those intending to migrate from old Merlin versions to current ones. I recently did this with my RT-AX88U and all in all, the experience has been a great success.
I swapped my USB flash drive for a new one (the old one had started giving wear-related errors), and took the opportunity to migrate from version 386.3_2 (2021) and moved to 388.8_4. (2024). I did a dirty upgrade -although I had to recover/restore the USB contents to the new flash drive- and everything was correctly running afterwards.

The only minor nit I found has been /jffs which apparently 'filled' some days after and could not perform any writes. It had to be rebuilt by resetting the router and restoring from a known good configuration and jffs backup files. The culprit was finally a very big file residing in /jffs/.asdbk which took about 90% of the available space in /jffs. It was apparently a .tar file not yet completely built from some of my pre-migration work. No problems erasing it once the /jffs was rebuilt.

The new version looks amazing and the improvements and stability are very obvious and welcome. Thanks a lot to Merlin and the development team!.

So in summary, if you have not migrated your router in a few years, do not be affraid to do it. Just take care and good backups of everything!

 

[kjoshj]

@FTC: we never know when vulns are discovered like last year that can brick devices or allow remote control, please do not go so long without updating. Hopefully no one else on these forums is so far out of update, especially on supported hardware... many with EoL AC devices would love to have the option to get updates.

 

[FTC]

@FTC: we never know when vulns are discovered like last year that can brick devices or allow remote control, please do not go so long without updating. Hopefully no one else on these forums is so far out of update, especially on supported hardware... many with EoL AC devices would love to have the option to get updates.

Thanks for the suggestion. You are absolutely right, however life is much more complex than just mantaining the router which takes time from other prioritary tasks and tends not to be cared for once a good stability level has been reached.
Meanwhile, and after a few more days have passed I've found the 'WebHistory suddently stopping' bug, and the 'clientlist stops refreshing after some days' bugs, which are not that important for my installation (and client list can be restored as easy as restarting the wireless service), so all in all, still quite happy.