Newbie: How to Handle Routing for First-Time Provisioning Without Direct Internet Access

Hi Balena Community,

I’m new to working with Balena and have a question regarding a specific use case.

When provisioning a device for the first time, what happens if the device does not have direct internet access? My understanding is that the routing table might need to be modified to ensure the device can connect to BalenaCloud.

If this is the case, do we expect users to manually make these modifications by connecting a keyboard, mouse, and monitor to the device? Or is there a way to preconfigure BalenaOS during or before provisioning to handle such scenarios automatically?

Thanks in advance for your guidance!

Hello @tguclu first of all welcome to the balena community!

Could you please share more details related to the use case where you are working?

If you already know that there will not be Internet access you have different choices. Some ideas here below, but happy to learn more about your use case to help you more.

If the device is going to be offline and the updates are going to be done without Internet, here you have a tutorial on how to run offline updates with balena

Another possibility is to run the balena preload instruction with the CLI to preload the services that the device needs in the OS image.

Let us know how we can help you more!