Hi there, as I love to work with Raspberry Pis, Docker and Balena, I have an idea: do you think it will be possible to convert this solution to Balena Cloud?
The mission is bloody simple: let’s use some RPis as WiFi bridge - so you can connect your devices without Wifi to your LINE, like some older printers etc. For this, the bridged mode is great, so the RPi will be just passing connections in transparent mode, so ie the printer will be connected to the LAN via Wifi.
I didn’t build any Balena projects before, but I would like to know if you think it’s possible…
I may be thinking about this too simple, but it sounds to me like simply setting up a shared connection in NetworkManager might be good enough for the basics?
I think you could do pretty much all of that through the system-connections alone.
First configure your WiFi connection to properly connect, and then add an ethernet connection with method set to shared.
NetworkManager will then spin up its own instance of dnsmasq, that should take care of the basics.
For more advanced configuration of the dnsmasq used by NetworkManager, you’d probably get into HostOS territory, which makes things a little more tricky.
If you really want it more advanced than just “connect my device to network”, I would need to do some digging about what you can and can’t do from the containers.
With the help of some DBus magic, many things are possible
Indeed @maxim, a WiFi bridge would be a great project to try out and balenafy. I wanted to try something right off the bat if the setup could work without configuration and went with balena WiFi Repeater project to extend my WiFi range.
For my use case, I wanted to share/bridge the internet connection from my Raspberry Pi4 using ethernet to other devices on my table. Using the WiFi extender project, I was able to get it working straight away by setting up the WiFi-repeater project and then connecting an ethernet cable from RPi4 to other devices. The connection being shared was flaky and a bit unreliable where sometimes it shared and sometimes it didn’t. Couldn’t debug the issue then.
I feel that with some configuration that @TJvV mentioned above. It can be made to work independently without any issues. I will post my research down below for some things I found when I was looking into this. Do let us know how your progress is coming along with this and I will be happy to help you with this. I might give it a shot sometime later too, and see how far we are able to get. Thanks for bringing this up!
