Setup cellular APN remotely

RDB · May 7, 2018, 9:08am

Hi All,

Is there an easy way to put the cellular APN info in the device without having to give acces to the device boot partition itself?

We have a device we are going to deploy remotely and the idea is to do this with local sim card providers.
Now i don’t want to give the user acces to the boot partition and it would be nice if they can add the device to a LAN internet connection and the APN will get provisioned remotely.

I really need some help to achieve this. Hopefully you guys have a nice solution or idea’s?

Thnx!

lucianbuzzo · May 8, 2018, 11:42am

Hi @RDB
You should be able to use the NetworkManager dbus API to configure APN settings. It should be a similar procedure to changing wifi settings remotely, which we have some documentation on here https://docs.resin.io/reference/resinOS/network/2.x/#changing-the-network-at-runtime

RDB · May 8, 2018, 11:55am

Yes i did have a look at it.
To test it out i would like to have the command to add a new connection.
I came up with the following but need to add the params for APN etc in the command.
Maybe you can help me out how to make the right command to add it?

DBUS_SYSTEM_BUS_ADDRESS=unix:path=/host/run/dbus/system_bus_socket \
dbus-send --system --print-reply \
            --dest=org.freedesktop.NetworkManager \
            org/freedesktop/NetworkManager \
            org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.Settings.AddConnection \
            string: ...

RDB · June 19, 2018, 1:41pm

Has anyone an idea how to get this working?
Because I havent got it working so far

majorz · June 20, 2018, 11:38am

dbus-send does not support passing complex data structures. If you have Python installed in the container then you may use those examples as a reference (first is using the python-networkmanager package, the second one - the dbus package, which is lower level):

github.com

seveas/python-networkmanager/blob/master/examples/add_connection.py

"""
Add a connection to NetworkManager. You do this by sending a dict to
AddConnection. The dict below was generated with n-m dump on an existing
connection and then anonymised
"""

import NetworkManager
import uuid

example_connection = {
     '802-11-wireless': {'mode': 'infrastructure',
                         'security': '802-11-wireless-security',
                         'ssid': 'n-m-example-connection'},
     '802-11-wireless-security': {'auth-alg': 'open', 'key-mgmt': 'wpa-eap'},
     '802-1x': {'eap': ['peap'],
                'identity': 'eap-identity-goes-here',
                'password': 'eap-password-goes-here',
                'phase2-auth': 'mschapv2'},
     'connection': {'id': 'nm-example-connection',
                    'type': '802-11-wireless',

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github.com

NetworkManager/NetworkManager/blob/master/examples/python/dbus/add-connection.py

#!/usr/bin/env python
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# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
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# GNU General Public License for more details.
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# You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along
# with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc.,
# 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA.
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# Copyright (C) 2010 - 2012 Red Hat, Inc.
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