How often does Density update the device firmware?
Density periodically releases automated firmware updates, ensuring your devices have the latest capabilities and the most up-to-date security enhancements. These automated updates are included as part of your Density subscription. Security updates are pushed outside scheduled firmware releases as needed.
How do Density devices receive updates?
To ensure every device has the latest capabilities and most recent security enhancements, Density pushes firmware over-the-air (OTA) updates on a regular basis. Devices regularly check into and securely communicate with Density update servers to check for available updates.
To ensure firmware authenticity, the update server authenticates devices and provides a time-limited HMAC-signed URL on AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) with the update, as well as a hash signature of the update. Updates are always a whole OS image.
In addition, to ensure seamless firmware updates, each device has a dual-partitioned firmware bank with automatic failover.
Ensuring Successful Updates
To ensure Density devices can successfully process OTA updates, verify all network requirements and whitelisting are in place as defined in our network requirements document Network Requirements
Density devices will require whitelisting to the following to successfully process updates:
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api.density.io - Used to send commands to devices, which includes the command to initiate an update
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ota.density.io - OS Release API: notifies device of new OS releases
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ota-artifacts.density.io - Cloudfront service for OTA files
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density-ota.s3.amazonaws.com - OS Releases: OS release archives
OTA Update Process
Before release, Density rigorously QA tests new firmware to identify any issues that may have been introduced in an updated build. This includes testing across various network variables, such as verifying the functionality with common switch brands and OSI layer 2 protocols.
Once QA testing is completed, OTA updates are gradually rolled out to devices in the field and closely monitored for any unexpected behavior. If a previously undiscovered issue is introduced via a new firmware build, Density will roll back updated devices to the previous stable release build while a fix is developed for the current version.
OTA Update Notifications:
Release notes can be accessed in the ‘Announcements' section of the Density help center.