Updating ZyXEL NBG6817
Our lab network runs on an old but solid ZyXEL NBG6817 (Armor Z2) with OpenWrt. It had been running OpenWrt 22.03.5 for years without anyone touching it. 22.03 has been end-of-life for a long time, so it no longer gets security fixes. Time to clean it up. This time I tried something new: almost all of the work was done by AI agents. Claude (Anthropic's coding agent, running in a Docker sandbox on my PC) did the inspection, built the firmware and ran the upgrade. A second model, Fable , reviewed the plan independently before anything touched the router. My job was to make decisions and be the hands when something physical was needed. Step 1: Is the router compromised? Before upgrading anything, we checked whether the old router had been tampered with. If it had, a backup of its configuration would carry the problem over to the new firmware. The check covered: running processes and open ports cron jobs, startup scripts and files changed outside the firmware image ...
