balenaOS without balenaSupervisor

Product support balenaOS
1

Hi,

In at least one of our use cases, having balenaSupervisor trying to connect to balenaCloud is a no go due to regulatory reasons. Using OpenBalena on premises would not solve the issues in this case. But we would still want software updates.

Can we have a custom BalenaOS withot balenaSupervisor that would still allow us to do offline updates for both OS and application?

A more complex scenario would be to have two bootalbe images on the device, one for production and other for maintenance. In this case it would be ok for the maintenance image to have balenaSupervisor, but we would want it to update both production and maintenance images. Ideally, the maintenance image should not have access to data, which will require some encryption wizardry, but I believe we can sort this bit ourselves.

Do you have something like this?

Thanks!

1 Like
2

Hi there, you can download an unmanaged balenaOS from balenaos.io, which won’t have the supervisor service enabled, since there is nothing for it to do. If you run os-config join ... in the unmanaged OS, it will join the designated app in balenaCloud and enable to supervisor to manage the releases.

Using unmanaged balenaOS + balena-cli offline/preload functionality would get you what you are after, but that means you will need physical access to device storage to update them every time you publish a new release.

3

@ab77 thank you! Yes, we understand the need of physical access for an update, and that is unfortunately a requirement for the use case. Thank you!