Firmware Upgrade Tools giving inconsistent results

[RossT]

Hi,

Just an advisory for anyone contemplating a firmware upgrade at the moment that there appear to be 2 different firmware upgrade tool web pages out there, and they give different results.

My FG200Es are currently on 5.4.8, and I need to upgrade them to 5.6.8.

The tool in the support portal at https://support.fortinet.com/Download/FirmwareImages.aspx says I need to go to 5.4.9 as an intermediate step.

The tool at https://docs2.fortinet.com/upgrade-tool says I need to go to 5.4.10 as an intermediate step!

So which is it? I opened a web chat with support and they said I should always use the support portal tool. I've asked them to correct or take down the other one as it is deeply confusing, and in some scenarios I imagine it would cause service impacing issues.

[Bubu]

Hi,

I have already made several upgrades on FGT200E from v5.4.9 to v5.6.8 without any problem. But in this case, you can do either one without any problem. What should be avoided is to update without following the intermediate jump. If you do not respect the upgrade path, yes you may have issues with some services.

Regards

[RossT]

Thanks for the info Bubu.

I was trying to be respectful of the upgrade path, that was the cause of my confusion, two tools with two different upgrade paths! Good to hear you can go via either interim version!

[Toshi_Esumi]

There almost always be a multiple paths if the new one is right next to the previous version. Those tools show one of "possible paths", which doesn't break the integrity of config database with syntax changes each step need to convert.

It doesn't necessary consider any software bugs they might have along the way. An example, even if you follow the tool's suggestion, it would break a zone config with the parent and vlan subinterfaces in members when you upgrade from like 5.4.x -> 5.6.3 or similar level due to a bug. We had to bring it up in 5.4.x as high as possible at the time we upgraded (we're still doing it when we need to upgrade for our customers) and jumped to 5.6.6, which has the bug fix.