Updating Default auth-retries setting in NetworkManager.conf from a container

Product support balenaOS
1

I’m looking for some help to see if anyone has any suggestion on how to make a change to /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf from a container. From what I can tell, my only real option is to remount the partition as rw in the Host OS and update the file directly. We’ve been having issues where we send out devices with preconfigured Wi-Fi for a site but the Network Software hasn’t been configured to allow the Device to connect yet (Allowlist MAC Filtering most often). We’ve also had cases where a change was made by our customer’s IT that didn’t account for our devices and blocked them from connecting just long enough to stop trying.

The default behavior is that it will only try 3 times to connect until the device is brought online some other way or rebooted. Often physical access to our Balena devices is pretty difficult. I know we can make a change to individual network configurations and we’ll be making sure to set the value going forward when individual connections are created but is there some way I can make a change to the default setting? I basically just need to add:

[connection]
connection.auth-retries=0

to NetworkManager.conf

1 Like
2

Hi,

As far as I’m aware, there’s no good way to do this (yet?).

In the past I’ve gone the route of mounting the image RW and modify the contents prior to flashing the image to multiple devices.
This works okay, but as soon as you run a HostOS update, your changes will be gone.
(In my case it was to add dispatch scripts)

An alternative would be to build a custom version of BalenaOS.
To me, this seems like a pretty big job just to change a network configuration, and also comes with its own issues if you ever want to update it.