AR300M: Online upgrade to 4.x firmware

Technical Support for Routers
1

Hello,

On the download center I’ve noticed that 4.x firmware is available for AR300M, however when I’ve turned on my router (use it for travel only and do not have it on always) and opened upgrade page it did not show me an option to upgrade.

Question: is 3.x → 4.x online upgrade possible for this router or there is no sense to wait and I should just upgrade manually?

Thanks

2

There are many changes so read the release notes carefully. If you made any changes to your router, write them all down before upgrading! I tried it on one of my AR300m that was running 3.216, by downloading the tar file to my PC, and upgrading it using the GI iNet GUI without saving my old config. The upgrade worked fine.

After a day of playing with it, I did not like it, so I decided it was time to just move this router to generic OpenWrt 23.05.0. It is amazing how little space OpenWrt takes, and OpenWrt on this old router seem snappy.

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3

I have the same question about GL-MT300N-V2 (Mango). Should we expect that 4.3.7 will become available for online upgrade down the road? Or is this going to be manual only due to the major changes from 3.x to 4.x?

Edit: found another thread, it looks like the decision not to auto update was permanent due to the changes in features available, unexpected need to reconfigure, etc.

4

Thank you for the reference @wrtf , however from the thread it’s not clear for me whether this decision is related to automatic update from 3 to 4 (the feature was removed in 4 from what I can see on my other gl-inet device) or just an online update when you click the button but don’t download the image manually.

5

Yep thanks for the cautions @eric, I’ve read the release notes mentioning that settings can’t be kept, luckily I don’t have much customizations there, just a few VPN profiles.

6

Good question, I wondered about this as well. My understanding of the feature had been that auto update would grab any new version that was available at the scheduled time (ie there aren’t versions that are “online but manual only”). Might be wrong though. Perhaps someone from GL-Inet could weigh in and clarify.

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