Balena device disconnects from VPN after network reconnect

openBalena
1

Hello there,

I am using OpenBalena and open-balena-admin to manage my IoT devices. I have successfully integrated Raspberry Pi 4 devices with OpenBalena and it works just fine in our controlled environment (i.e. always power/internet backups, on-prem devices, etc). We have deployed some devices in remote areas where the internet/electricity is not stable. Now, the issue is, when the device disconnects from the wifi or gets power interruption, the next time it reconnects, sometimes it fails to connect to the VPN. That time, we have to reboot it manually, otherwise, we can not SSH into the device. When the device comes back by itself, we get the status by using balena device XXXX command

STATUS:                idle
IS ONLINE:             false

Is there any way that we can follow to get the devices connected to the VPN without rebooting the device manually? Thanks for your kind help.

1 Like
2

Hello @ahmadalsajid

thanks for sharing this information and that you are able to run OpenBalena with the great open-balena-admin tool!

I wonder what version of balenaOS you are currently running on the devices that fail to reconnect to the VPN. We do support balenaOS versions and their operations 2 years from balenaOS release date.
If the OS version is far older, we recommend to update the device to a more recent version.

Best Regards
Harald

3

Hey @fisehara,
Thanks for your reply. I got a solution to my situation (I don’t know if that is a clean solution or not, but it works). I am using Open Balena v3.8.2, and my Balena OS is raspberrypi4-64-2.108.18+rev2-v14.4.10. In Open Balena v3.8.2, the OPENBALENA_VPN_VERSION_TAG=v11.4.6 that I changed to OPENBALENA_VPN_VERSION_TAG=v11.26.0 (the latest one) manually, and now it works perfectly fine.
Now, when there is a power interruption or a network glitch, the device gets online as soon as the power/network is restored. We do not need to restart the device physically.

1 Like
4

Hello @ahmadalsajid

thanks for reporting back that you found a solution by updating the openVPN server version on the OpenBalena deployment.

Best Regards
Harald