Howto Upload New Firmware To Turris Omnia

I had to resuscitate my Turris Omnia today after factory reset (done from UI). OS got downgraded to v4.0.1 from v5 or v6 (sorry I haven’t checked and LuCI interface looks the same). All good, but then updater failed with:

Updater failed:

inconsistent: Candidate exists for virtual package ath10k-firmware-qca9888-ct-htt

It is suprising that to download Turris OS image is much harder than downloading regular OpenWRT image. Google showed just misleading results.

After I searched for the error message directly I got to this page: https://docs.turris.cz/hw/omnia/rescue-modes/ and after that it went fast and simple and upgraded to version 6.0.3.

• download https://repo.turris.cz/hbs/medkit/omnia-medkit-latest.tar.gz
• download https://repo.turris.cz/hbs/medkit/omnia-medkit-latest.tar.gz.sha256
• copy to USB flash disk (multiple partitions are fine) and connect to Turris Omnia
• press reset button on Turris Omnia and wait until 4 LEDs are lit
• it will rewrite internal eMMC storage so I guess factory image gets upgraded too
• wait until LEDs stop blinking and see regular state with green LAN0-4 and others
• connect to 192.168.1.1 and set it up

I’m just a basic user so I found out today it is possible to save snapshots via schnapps.

And my long term opinion?

• I haven’t reset Turris for more than year (bought 04/2021) and had mSATA drive connected there. It worked just fine, but reforis in v4 or v5 complained it is broken and since I’ve used LuCI I just ignored it.
• Reforis in v4 is so bad from user experience, v6 is better.
• Had to replace power brick since original one failed - bought 40W from Meanwell.
• And the reason I decided to do a factory reset is
  • network interface restarted randomly (cable)
  • after recent upgrade I had to reconnect cables to get LAN to work again even after power cycle (should wait longer than 30s)
  • sometimes there were random WiFi slowdowns last two months (even without any Transmission or NAS)
  • also couldn’t handle Transmission with encrypted disk well - random network slowdowns, nor just being NAS through SSHFS - max 15-20MB/s for AES - not bad at first, but from long term perspective too slow and it seems it is a CPU limitation being too slow, no AES acceleration instructions (currently the card has been removed from a slot and I’m deciding what to do next)

See also:

• https://forum.turris.cz/t/not-able-to-update-after-factory-reset/18033
• https://docs.turris.cz/hw/omnia/rescue-modes/#re-flash-router