Junos OS

Greetings 

We are facing an issue with our SRX 1500 firewalls. Both firewalls work currently as HA cluster (Active/Active). Their current version is 21.4R3.15. The recommended version as per Juniper is the 23.4R2.13. The recommended upgrade path is 21.4R3.14 --> 22.4R3.25 --> 23.4R2.13.

We tried to upgrade the secondary firewall first from 21.4 to 22.4. The firmware gets installed successfully. After we reboot the device, we notice the booting process cannot be completed properly and the device goes to Root mode making it inaccessible. The strange thing is that even if we reboot it again, the booting process takes hours to complete and the device gets frozen. 

Same behavior was noticed even if we tried to install the 23.4 firmware.

Any thoughts please why this happening? Any workaround i could try?

Hi Dimitrios

This could be because  with versions 22.4 and 23.4, Juniper introduced stricter requirements for the BIOS and SSD firmware

try a format install, this will ensure bootloader is the right one

Steps:

1 Download the "Install Media" image: Do not use the standard .tgz upgrade package. Download the USB Install Media version of Junos 22.4R3.25 or 23.4R2.13 from the Juniper site.

2 Create a Bootable USB: Use a tool like dd or Rufus to create the bootable drive.

3 Perform a Format Install:

◦ Boot the SRX and interrupt the boot process to get to the loader> prompt.

◦ Insert the USB and run: install file:///junos-install-srx1500-x86-64-22.4R3.25.tgz (or the specific filename).

◦ This will format the internal disk and install the OS cleanly.

thank you Rene for your response, very helpful. 

Does the above procedure erases the config of the device? 

In addition, i want to mention here that our two firewalls are set with H, so in that case do i have to follow a procedure slightly different? Please advice.

thank you

HI

Yes it will wipe it off fully.

They key thing is to save configs, then follow standard HA process to re-join

Pre-Upgrade Preparation

Before touching the secondary node, back up the configuration of the current cluster.

• Backup Config: save /var/tmp/cluster_config_backup.conf

• Check Status: Ensure show chassis cluster status shows Node 0 as primary and Node 1 as secondary.

• Verify Redundancy: Ensure all critical traffic is being handled by Node 0 so you can safely take Node 1 offline.