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Landono's avatar
Landono
Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
Oct 01, 2013

Updating Firmware on BIg IP LTM Machines From Command Line

I have eight LTM boxes I need to update from 11.2 to 11.4.1. Currently these machines are in different datacenters, which all have gigabit pipes into them. From what I've seen so far, the only way to upgrade the firmware is to upload the iso to the box over the gui. The issue with that is that my office connection is only a 90 mbps line, so this will take quite a while, as opposed to doing it locally on the box, which has a much larger pipe to the internet. Is there any way to do it locally, so I could avoid the upload bottleneck here?

 

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  • What_Lies_Bene1's avatar
    What_Lies_Bene1
    Icon for Cirrostratus rankCirrostratus
    Oct 01, 2013

    Only 90mbps! There's a few solutions open to you here;

     

    1) Upload the file once to a single box and then scp/sftp it from there to the other boxes; assuming they have connectivity to each other

     

    2) Use a CLI command such as wget to pull the file directly from downloads.f5.com to each box; if each device has internet access and assuming the authorisation doesn't get in the way

     

    3) Post a USB stick to someone local

     

    Either way, I'd recommend you use a scp/sftp client to upload the file, not the GUI; there's less overhead. Something like pscp.

     

  • Landono's avatar
    Landono
    Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
    Oct 04, 2013

    We were able to do this over command line using scp and a few tmsh commands. I'm posting our procedure here so that others can use it if they find this. While F5 documents this well, each part is in a different document, so I'm combining all steps here.

     

    To copy the iso image over: scp Big-IP-Firmware.iso user@x.x.x.x:/shared/images

     

    To install new image: tmsh install sys software image BIGIP-11.4.1.608.0.iso volume HD1.3

     

    To see status of software install: tmsh show sys software

     

    Once image is installed, select it as the preferred boot device: switchboot -b HD1.3

     

    Reboot machine into new image: reboot