BalenaOS Does Not Update a Container

This seems likely a duplicate of balena thinks service is downloaded but it will not start

I have noticed several times that Balena will only partially update a device to a new release–some containers will get ‘stuck’, displaying ‘Downloaded → Running’ in the dashboard but never actually switching to the newer release. Like the other forum post, restarting/rebooting has sometimes fixed this, but as of today I am faced with a container that will not update even after rebooting the device.

We (well I at least) would really like to green-light Balena for our project, but this issue is serious enough to affect our decision.

Is there at least some sort of workaround more elegant than ‘push another release and hope that one works’?

Hi Lucas,

Could you provide further details on what kind of device, OS and supervisor versions are you using?

On the forum item you linked the problem was a a dependency between two containers where the depended service was exiting too quickly and not giving the engine time to start the second service (this would have happened with regular docker as well).

That is one reason that may explain the behavior you are observing, but there may be others as well. If you can provide with further information we will be happy to assist you in diagnosing the problem.

Cheers
Felipe

It’s a Raspberry Pi 4, balenaOS 2.73.1+rev1, supervisor 12.4.6.

One thing we noticed was that the docker-compose (adapted from an actual docker-compose) had an unsupported tag in it: container_name. We removed that line and it has since begun working for one of our devices, but two others are still stuck. Since the issue we’ve been experiencing is intermittent anyway, I’m not convinced that it’s related, but it’s a lead…

Hi

Can you share diagnostics to the device and check the device health? This should help us rule out any obvious issues.

If those 2 are fine, we’d like see the supervisor logs - when the issue actually happens. You can find more info on how to get those logs here - Balena Device Debugging Masterclass - Balena Documentation

If you see that the device gets stuck like this, please feel free to share support access to the device and let us know the UUID. That way we’d be able to check the device for info as well!

Hi, I would like to follow up here. Were you able to resolve the issue without our help? Otherwise would you be able to share device checks, diagnostics and supervisor logs as my colleague suggests? Thanks

I’m sorry, I’ve been knee-deep in Azure pipelines for the past week, but the last pipelines I need to set up will be to deploy to our Balena apps, so I’m sure I’ll have more information in the coming week.

Hi Lucas,

Did you have a chance to take another look at this?

We’d need these logs and access to the device for further troubleshooting. Let us know if we could help with anything specific.

Cheers…