RPi showing as offline but its still powered up

Product support
1

Hi, new to balenaCloud and utterly loving it so far! Except for one key issue.

I left my pi on overnight in the lab, so that I could ssh in from elsewhere this morning and continue work (which is building a gateway for wind turbine blade MEMs sensors for anyone who gets a kick out of hearing about projects!).

Unfortunately, this morning balenaCloud is showing the device as offline since about midnight. I expected to get into the lab and find something unplugged but I’ve arrived and it’s still all turned on, lights showing.

This is going to be deployed to a wind turbine next week, hopefully it’ll be out there for a fortnight gathering data - I can’t be going out there to unplug it and plug it back in every few hours.

Is there a remote solution for this? Or even any insight into what caused it?

TIA!!

3

Hi Tom, I have a few questions that could help and clarify the situation:

  • how long has this been happening, at least as far as you are aware? Is this the first time?
  • Was the status of the device “Heartbeat only” or “Offline”? is it permanently in this state, or does it sometimes go from one to the other?
  • When did this happen? did you push a release that triggered the issue perhaps? did anything change recently at the facility regarding power or networking, like firewalls?
  • What connection is your pi on? Ethernet, wifi or cellular?
  • Does the lab have any firewall rules that could prevent balena services such as the VPN? (cloudlink.balena-cloud.com or vpn.balena-cloud.com) We suggest that you wildcard the domain so there are no connectivity issues (*.balena-cloud.com)
  • are there any devices at at the same location exhibiting similar behaviour? If so, are they running the same balenaOS release?
  • Have you tried a power cycle on the device?
5

Hi @jaomaloy thanks for the quick response!

In the last few minutes we’ve figured out the problem and thankfully it has nothing to do with balenaCloud. The university recently merged with two others, and the phone company (swisscom) that services us rotated the contract (I thought it was suspicious that it happend at midnight on the last day of the month!!) - to the sim card in the modem is duff.

Not very helpful but not on balena! And thanks again for the quick response and such a great product, this is taking so much pain away for me really quickly.

1 Like
8

Hi Tom, good to know that and about your use case, please continue to use forums if you have any questions/doubts. balena team and community members would be happy to assist you and I’m excited to see this going into prod collecting data from wind turbines :slight_smile: