Interactive network config?

Product support balenaOS
1

Does balenaOS support any form of interactive/end-user network config? For example, when the balena logo is visible, can the user hit some key sequence (ESC / CTL+N / etc) to be prompted for: wifi/ethernet, SSID name/details (if wifi), auto/manual IP config, and then if manual: IP/mask, gateway, DNS, etc.

The cli “balena os config” prompt does this pre-deployment, but we sometimes deliver hardware or VM virtual appliances to customers that have static IP info that needs to change at some point in the future. Obviously, it is great when we can remotely reconfigure the box in unison with the customer,
but it seems like that only happens about half the time. Having the customer return the hardware to us to reconfigure the IP is problematic - as is having us generate a new OVA, just to update IP info. It would be amazing if we could just tell the customer to connect a monitor+keyboard (or open the VM in HyperV/VMWare Desktop/ESXi/etc) and hit CTL+N, then follow the prompts to get something back online.

2

CTRL+ALT+F2 makes the logo/splash go away, but there is no prompt or CLI under it.

CTRL+ALT+F1 makes it come back…

I should be clear that what I’m asking for is not dev mode. It is: “Production mode where something went wrong, the cloud is no longer accessible, and we’d like an on-site tech that likely doesn’t work for us to be able to quickly fix it”

3

It looks like this might be possible by having a service that is sitting on a call to plymouth watch-keystroke, and when a particular keystroke is received, it can use a series of calls like:
plymouth message "Interface enp2s0 - IPv4-Method: manual"
plymouth message "Interface enp2s0 - IPv4-IP: 1.2.3.4/24"
plymouth message "Interface enp2s0 - IPv4-Gateway: 1.2.3.1"
.
.
.
plymouth ask-question --prompt "Would you like to reconfigure enp2s0?" | reconfigure-script --read-from-stdin enp2s0"

And then “reconfigure-script” would prompt for each option and call nmcli to set the answer:
plymouth ask-question --prompt "What IPv4-Method should be used (manual/auto)?" | xargs nmcli dev mod enp2s0 ipv4.method
.
.
.

… even though I used xargs above, it would more likely be that the bash script would just capture the stdout from plymouth ask-question, validate the answer, and then call nmcli.

I’ll try to put something together to see if I can get this working.