I’ve been encountering a puzzling issue with my BBGW (BeagleBone Green Wireless) that’s running BalenaOS with two applications installed: my custom nodejs application and WiFi Connect. So far, I’ve only deployed one device in the field, connected via a 4G USB modem. Initially, everything was running smoothly for several months. However, lately, I’ve been facing some challenges.
The problem arises when the device fails to send data from my custom application or abruptly stops after a few seconds. Additionally, there are instances where the device shows as online, but data transmission from our application only begins after I SSH into the device. On some occasions, the device is reported as offline, but the CPU/memory usage metrics in balena CLI seem to update fine.
To tackle this issue, I’ve tried analysing “Balena Logs” from the CLI and I noticed that there is a gap in the logs during the time the device is not transmitting data.
Any suggestions or insights on how to proceed with debugging would be greatly appreciated.
Hi @fencer ! I was giving some thought to your (puzzling, indeed!) question. I am afraid I don’t have a definitive answer, but here are some things you may want to look into:
First, take a look at this thread from 2020. Seems to be a similar issue, so some of the troubleshooting ideas may help you. (Sadly, in this case the user ended up giving up on the BBGW )
Did you check the kernel logs (with dmesg)? Perhaps some peripheral on the BBGW is hibernating after some time?
This is a long shot, but in the recent times we have seen various users having networking issues with cellular connections because the carrier changed some configuration without notice. Notably, some were reducing the MTU, so the device would fail to send packages because it was still using the old, larger MTU. (Doesn’t seem to be the case here, but maybe this can give you some idea.)
I hope this helps – and please let us know if you find any other clue!
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