Bulk firmware upgrade using node-upgrade command

 

The node-upgrade tool is used to upgrade the firmware of managed console servers, allowing administrators to easily perform firmware upgrades on all or on a range of their console server deployment.

Similar to the other node- commands, node-upgrade uses the SSH tunnel to transfer the firmware image image from Lighthouse CMS and initiate the upgrade.  So unlike the Command Console Servers upgrade command, access to an external HTTP server is not required, making it ideal for firewalled environments.

Note: The node-upgrade command requires the remote console server to have USB local storage available on the selected console server to store the firmware image prior to upgrade. Most Opengear products have internal flash storage that is suitable for this purpose, apart from the CM4100 console servers, SD4000 device servers and the ACM5000 Remote Site Managers without a -F designation.

Getting Started

The node-upgrade tool is based on the node-command tool, and many basic arguments such as displaying help and selecting console servers are the same.  Please refer to the node-command article for additional information.

Staging Firmware on Lighthouse CMS

First, node-upgrade needs the firmware file to be available on the Lighthouse CMS's filesystem.

For temporary storage of the files, they can be placed at /tmp, otherwise, the non-volatile storage at /var/nvlog is a good place to store firmware images.

The appropriate firmware image can be copied on to the Lighthouse CMS's filesystem with using a program like WinScp from Windows PCs or scp CLI from OSX, Linux and other Unix-like systems, e.g.:

          scp acm550x-3.11.1.flash root@lighthouse:/var/nvlog/

Upgrading Firmware

Run node-upgrade with the --firmware-file parameter, specifying the full path to the firmware file staged in the previous step, and the appropriate arguments selecting the console servers to upgrade.

e.g. to upgrade all ACM5500s to 3.11.1 that have not been upgraded already: (the syntax below only works in Lighthouse 4.x)

          node-upgrade --select-match ‘Model=ACM55.*’ --deselect-match ‘Version=3.11.1’ --firmware-file /var/nvlog/acm550x-3.11.1.flash

Note: this article and examples is specific to the older Lighthouse 4 version. The Lighthouse 5 examples are available in the manual here https://opengear.com/support/documentation/