With regards to official support, I see many references to running the latest FW on a particular platform.
While that’s all well and good, generally speaking, unless there’s a specific requirement to upgrade; new feature or a bug fix, no upgrade should occur.
EG, for the sake of argument, let’s say 6.3.3 on either HW version of a 305 is installed. Let’s say there’s an issue that is not documented as being fixed in later versions. Officially, it would seem to me that Peplink should troubleshoot this instead of simply saying upgrade to the latest version. Generally speaking, most every manufacturer will do this; support back to a particular version of code.
For those that have large estates, simply upgrading for the sake of upgrading is not a good use of time nor resources.
That said, officially speaking, what is Peplink’s stance on supported versions? Is there any documentation to this end hiding as I’ve not been able to find anything.
There is no particular documentation on supported and unsupported versions of firmware.
Peplink’s approach might be a bit different compared to other vendors when it comes to bugfixes and new firmware versions.
Mainly because we like to keep management straight forward and easy.
Instead of dealing with seperate security patches, bugfixes and firmware upgrades we only publish complete new versions of firmware.
We do encourage Peplink users to upgrade firmware to the latest available GA version because we add patches, bugfixes and new features to newer firmware versions.
If someone reports a problem and is running an older firmware versions we’ll always ask to upgrade to the latest version because a reported problem might already been fixed in the latest version.
We also made the firmware upgrade process very easy and allow 2 firmware versions on Peplink routers to be able to roll back immediately in case a newer version of firmware is not working as expected.
I hope that explains Peplink’s approach to firmware management.
Though what I’m really looking for is come commitment on troubleshooting an issue on an existing version of firmware when it’s either inconclusive that there’s been some documented bug, or simply an issue that’s not been encountered before.
The issue here is that, more often than not, some new bug not related to the issue at hand is introduced in later firmware, and I like to avoid upgrading unless there’s a specific need to. In these scenarios, I don’t want to be told to simply upgrade, and there will come a point where either we’re running on firmware that has been particularly stable for an environment that works for us that is perhaps a bit old, and/or you have to support too many versions.
If I have a 310 on FW 6.3.0, which is over three years old, are you suggesting that if an issue is discovered that’s not covered in any subsequent release notes as a fix, Peplink will go through all the motions to troubleshoot that particular version without simply saying we must upgrade?