Upgrading from VyOS 1.4-rolling-202103201746 to latest

[ramonmedina]

I’m running VyOS 1.4-rolling-202103201746 in my home lab. I’m trying to update it to a recent rolling, but I’m not able to do so.

When I try to “add system image /media/vyos-2025.07.13-0023-rolling-generic-amd64.iso” I get the response:

MD5 checksum file is missing from ISO.
Exiting…

I can see that the iso contains a sha256 checksum now. I tried looking if I could find an archived 1.4 rolling that still had MD5 checksums, but it seems they are not archived anywhere.

What are my options? Do I have to run a clean install to get on latest?

Thanks for your help in advance!

-Ramon

[Apachez]

The downside of doing a too large jump when it comes to versions (you are jumping from march 2021 to july 2025).

Could you perhaps manually add a md5 sum and retry the update?

Something like this:

md5sum /media/vyos-2025.07.13-0023-rolling-generic-amd64.iso > /media/vyos-2025.07.13-0023-rolling-generic-amd64.iso.md5

When it comes to the config itself it should work since the magic string at the bottom of the config tells the VyOS config engine which version each section is made from so it then knows which migrationscript to use.

If the above (make your own md5-file) doesnt work I would try to take a backup of your current /config/config.boot (or whatever the file is named), reinstall the system with the latest 1.5 nightly and after its completed you put back the backup into /config/config.boot and reboot the system.

It should now detect that each config section is older than current and run the needed migrationscripts for each configblock and finally have your config updated into 1.5 lingo.

[ramonmedina]

The MD5 sum didn’t work. It’s looking for it inside the iso.

I cloned the VM (just in case) and ran the installer for the new rolling iso. It asked me if I wanted to bring the config over from the existing installation that it detected automatically.

It was smooth as butter. I really can’t tell the difference in the config other than better indentation.

When I get home I’ll switch to the new VM and see if it works, but I’m expecting no issues.

Thanks!

[Apachez]

Ah yes, update will be the same as a new install and it will detect an already present installation.

Difference is the amount of downtime you will get when the install is being runned compared to an update which only have the reboot as the downtime.

What happens is that each install have its own directory used for persistent storage and then the squashfs file from within the ISO is used as base for the unionfs filesystem.

This way when you later need to revert to your previous install then the old config (storage in its persistent directory) will be used - compared to competitors where you would need to manually also revert the config from a backup.