Skip to main content

Upgrade Considerations

Before upgrading please review the following information.

Upgrade Installer

For software versions prior to 6.3.0, before upgrading or installing, update the Installer to the latest version. Failing to upgrade the installer may result in a rollback failure, should a rollback be necessary at any time.

Rollback Considerations

With an upgrade or installation of SSR v6.3.0, conductor rollbacks are performed using the request system software revert command from the conductor's PCLI. On routers, it is recommended that upgrades are performed from the conductor's GUI. Router rollbacks must be performed from the PCLI.

Beginning with SSR v6.3.0, the use of the interactive installer is not supported, or necessary. Software installation and upgrade upgrade activities are supported from the GUI or PCLI; rollback activities can only be performed from the the PCLI.

With software versions earlier than 6.3.0, upgrading or rolling back an earlier version of the SSR software on a peer condutor or router that is managed by a conductor using the interactive installer (install128t) may result in the system becoming unresponsive. For this reason it is highly recommended that managed router rollbacks be performed through the conductor UI. Manual upgrades and rollbacks may not be resilient to failures. See Rolling Back Software for more information on these operations.

Configuration Validation Changes

Several modifications have been made to the verification process for configurations. As a result, configurations that were valid in earlier versions of the SSR software may now present configuration errors. The information below provides an awareness of what to look for and address.

The following configuration validation checks may present errors in previously valid configurations:

The Candidate configuration is not synchronized between nodes and is not stored on disk.

Configuration changes are always made to a candidate configuration. In releases prior to 5.3 the candidate configuration was stored on disk and would persist through product reboots. The candidate configuration is no longer saved to disk and will not persistent through reboot.

Additionally, the candidate configuration is no longer synchronized between HA nodes. Only the running configuration is synchronized between nodes.

It is strongly recommended to frequently save the candidate configuration using the export config command while working, especially if you are performing multiple changes. Doing so will provide a checkpoint for changes to be committed. Changes to the running configuration are only made when the configuration is committed.

A Profile is required when performance-monitoring is enabled on a neighborhood.

Stricter validations have been added to enforce the requirement that a profile must be configured when performance-monitoring is enabled on a neighborhood. This requirement was loosely enforced prior to version 5.3 through configuration checks. With the stricter checks, errors may appear in previously valid configurations. These configurations should be updated immediately after upgrade to ensure correct operation of the redundant interfaces during failover.

A service with a peer-service route that does not have security configured generates an "Error: Candidate configuration is invalid: Security not configured" message.

Services with a peer-service route must have security configured. If there is no security configuration, the message "Error: Candidate configuration is invalid: Security not configured" is displayed when performing a commit on new configuration changes. Stricter validations have been added. With the stricter checks, errors may appear in previously valid configurations. These configurations should be updated by configuring a security policy on each service with a peer and next-peer service route.

Stricter validations have been added to InterfaceRedundancyCheck:

When configuring redundant interfaces, all configured fields must be identical. This requirement was loosely enforced prior to version 5.3 through configuration checks, and allowed invalid configurations to be accepted. Stricter checks have been added, causing errors to appear in previously valid configurations. To avoid any configuration issues, it is highly recommended to correct the errors as well as perform a manual comparison of the redundant interfaces immediately after upgrade to ensure correct operation during failover.

Committing changes to a configuration during an upgrade is not permitted:

Committing configuration changes is not allowed when the system is in a "mixed version" state that may occur during an upgrade. For example, if one node of an HA pair is at 4.5.3 and an upgrade to 5.3 or higher has been performed on the other node, do not attempt to commit a configuration change until both nodes are updated to the new release.

Plugin Configuration Generation Changes

The configuration generation for plugins have been adapted to work with the improved configuration handling available in 5.3 and higher. When upgrading from a 4.x version of conductor, no action is required to take advantage of this new functionality.

However, when upgrading from 5.1 or 5.2 to version 5.3 or higher, the following plugins must be updated prior to upgrading the SSR conductor. Please see Upgrading an Existing Plugin for instructions.

PluginVersion
dns-cache>=3.2.1
dns-app-id>=3.1.3
ha-sync-redundancy>=1.1.0
icmp-reachability-detection>=3.0.3
wireguard>=2.0.3