Hello Martijn.
According to the logs you sent, the Ethernet via usb interface on this device works.
It does not have an ip address configured, this is why you can’t reach it with balena ssh.
The default image provided by beaglebone assigns the 192.168.7.2 ip address to this interface. This is not the case for any other Linux distribution.
If you don’t have a config file with a static ip address, NetworkManager (which runs in BalenaOS images) expects the other side of the Ethernet (in this case usb) cable to provide an ip address via DHCP. If the other side is your computer, I guess it is not running a DHCP server.
It seems like the device still assigns the usb0 interface a link-local IPv6 address so you may be able to see it with tools like avahi-discover, but that is not the point.
You need to configure a static ip for this interface, in order to do so, create a file in the system-connections folder of the boot partition of the sd card containing ( like described here https://www.balena.io/docs/reference/OS/network/2.x/#setting-a-static-ip ):
[connection]
id=my-ethernet
type=ethernet
interface-name=usb0
permissions=
secondaries=
[ethernet]
mac-address-blacklist=
[ipv4]
address1=192.168.1.111/24,192.168.1.1
dns=8.8.8.8;8.8.4.4;
dns-search=
method=manual
[ipv6]
addr-gen-mode=stable-privacy
dns-search=
method=auto
The above will assign the address 192.168.1.111 to the beaglebone and use 192.168.1.1 as a gateway for accessing any other address.
It means that the computer on which the usb cable is plugged needs to be assigned the address 192.168.1.1 on this usb-ethernet interface and do NAT if you need the beaglebone to be able to access anything else than this computer.
I will close the linked issue as the usb ethernet driver works according to the logs you’ve sent.