GSM device goes offline after about 8 hours

Product support balenaOS
32

Thank you Bruno, certainly do let us know of any developments.

34

It is possible that I found an mm bug. See this thread I opened:
https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/modemmanager-devel/2019-December/007588.html

If the developer provides a patch, could you assist me in deploying it?

38

Hello Bruno,
I’ve seen there’s a PR on modem manager now. I’m going to try building a balenaOS image for rpi3 with it. I’ll keep you updated.

39

Hi @zvin,

it should be this one: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mobile-broadband/ModemManager/merge_requests/229

Please double-check.

40

Bruno, I’ve sent you a rpi3 disk image with the patch applied, can you please test it? You’ll need to manually add your config.json file and NetworkManager config file in the first partition before flashing.

43

I will set it up today and keep you informed about the status of the device.

46

Two things I noticed:

  1. The image you sent is a production image, while I had been using a dev image before. My impression is that this is not a problem regarding re-testing the connectivity issue.
  2. The device I set up cannot download the application images:
...
12.12.19 12:47:31 (+0100) Failed to download image 'registry2.balena-cloud.com/v2/fb25e5bcefd595a8661e30c58531a892@sha256:45a84ab6cc021948e77d8f6ea01aaf4266b6846f68ff2c2fbef29d7b60ab8eec' due to '(HTTP code 404) no such image - no such image: registry2.balena-cloud.com/v2/fb25e5bcefd595a8661e30c58531a892@sha256:45a84ab6cc021948e77d8f6ea01aaf4266b6846f68ff2c2fbef29d7b60ab8eec: No such image: registry2.balena-cloud.com/v2/fb25e5bcefd595a8661e30c58531a892@sha256:45a84ab6cc021948e77d8f6ea01aaf4266b6846f68ff2c2fbef29d7b60ab8eec '

I do not know why that is, but I consider it independent of the connectivity issue. The device is connected and I will watch it now for the next hours/days.

Edit: Issue #2 has itself resolved now without any action from my side.

47

@zvin

I have seen the ModemManager in your image is version 1.10.6. This is what the mm dev wrote:

The patch I wrote goes on top of git master (1.13.x) but I assume the
balena.io developers backported it on top of 1.10.6? Don’t know.
They should anyway upgrade to 1.12.2, as the 1.10.x branch is no
longer really maintained.

Can you comment on that?

50

@zvin

I just recognized that with your image, the problem is still there. Could you confirm that you backported this patch


into version 1.10.6 to create the image?

Thanks a lot
Bruno

53

We didn’t backport the patch, it applied on 1.10.6 with no changes.

58

Hi @bvetter,

I’ve been in contact with the OS team, and we’ve raised a new issue for this moving ModemManager to 1.12.2: https://github.com/balena-os/meta-balena/issues/1775
Unfortunately I can’t give you an ETA for this but if you follow the attached ticket you should see the changes as progress is made.

Best regards,

Heds

60

Hi, this issue is still in progress. The MM devs have provided another patch that I would like to test:

The dev says it is not advisable to backport the patch to the MM version used in balena. Can your give me some advice how to build and deploy the patch? I know you have done that before.

64

Hi, thanks for the info. I think this patch has a good chance to get to the new OS version after it’s merged.
While it’s a WIP, you could try it yourself building your own version of balenaOS with that patch included.

You can find build instructions on our balenaOS website.

Including the patch would require modification of build recipes for the modem manager. You can find an example of what files are modified in a recent commit that upgrades modem version:

66

I try to build balena. Do you have some instructins on how to setup a build environment on a mac? I am following the directions from the yocto website, but the balena build needs additional dependencies, for example docker, npm, node, iptables.

Currently I am using a crops/poky container that I modified in a sort of hacky way so that I can run docker inside it.
Is there a more convenient setup for building balena on a mac?

67

Hi. I teached myself how to build balenaOS and went through a couple of iterations with the ModemManager developer.

The bug is fixed now in version 1.12.8 of ModemManager. The fix is very important, because the Huawei 909 modem will not work reliably without it. Without it, the device goes offline without any chance to recover it remotely.

Could you please check when version 1.12.8 could be integrated into balenaOS?

70

Hello Bruno,
An issue has been created for this, you can track its progress here: https://github.com/balena-os/meta-balena/issues/1859