Suggestions for REMOTE Upgrade from openHABian 3.x to 4.x

Setup, Configuration and Use Migration
1

I manage a number of remote openHABian/R-Pi systems through Tailscale, mostly running 3.x and I’m in a position to upgrade from that to 4.x. I know the best way to do this is a backup, full 4.x install, restore, then fix rules, etc.

In order to avoid going on-site to do this, I would like to try upgrading remotely. If I need to I can go onsite for the ones that fail the remote upgrade.

I have some idea how I want to do this but would definitely appreciate any insight. What I’m thinking is something like this:

  • Create & save a local backup using the openHABian console & Filezilla

  • Manually upgrade Tailscale (learned this lesson previously remotely upgrading systems from OH 2.x to 3.x)

  • Verify/upgrade from Buster to Bullseye - Should I go straight to Bookworm, or if they are currently running Bullseye (most of them), should I use this opportunity to go to Bookworm?

  • Upgrade Java to 17 through the openHABian console? (or will this come with the upgrade to 4.x?)

  • Upgrade from openHAB3 to “Release” using openHABian console menu item 01, THEN upgrade to OH 4.x using openHABian console menu item 40/41?

  • Replace the 3.x rules with 4.x rules

  • Test, check logs, sign off…

2

You cannot go straight to Bookworm. You must go to Bullseye first.

In my experience, the move from Bookworm to Bullseye failed 5 out of 5 tries. The problem is Bookworm changed the networking stack and after the upgrade the networking was completely broken and required physical access to re-enable it again. But because the networking was upgrade part way through the upgrade, the OS was in a broken state and needed to be reimaged anyway.

My experience going from Buster to Bullseye was 2 out of three tries worked.

So I am not at all optimistic that you’ll be able to pull this off.

No, you’ll need to update Java separately.

3

Thanks Rikoshak, that sounds like my experience with Tailscale. There were prompts I needed to respond to but it dropped during the upgrade. I will upgrade any systems from Buster to Bullseye but leave the Bullseye to Bookworm upgrade until the end of the LTS cycle.

4

Can you prepare a SD card and send it to site for someone to swap out?

Its a bad feeling waiting for a device to come back online.

Install the PI connect to have another method to SSH into you PI if you want to go down that route.

You can always delete it after you know tailscale is going to work.

https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/services/connect.html#connect-lite

5

You should be separating your upgrade into 2 stages.

Upgrading openHAB 3 → 4 is independent of upgrading the OS and doesn’t come with the risk of bricking your system i.e. getting stuck in some state without network access. Use the openHABian menus. Don’t touch the OS for now.

When but only when you’re done here and on v4, reinstall your systems using the latest openHABian image, one after the other. Use 64bit to be prepared for OH5

@denominator gives an excellent advice:
you can prepare a new SD and send it on site for someone to exchange it. That way you will also have the old SD as a fallback.

Check and test using the openhabian.conf options to provide your Tailscale key so the fresh install will automatically connect to your VPN.
Export your (now v4) openHAB config and put it onto the first partition as initial.zip then the new box should come up with the full config in effect
You can validate the setup at home.

6

Gentlemen, this is really helpful, thanks! This put me on the path to establishing a successful process for upgrading these systems.