Many GSM modems seem to occasionally lock up or behave badly with ModemManager, often a restart of ModemManager or power cycling the modem will re-establish the connection.
It would be great to add an optional watchdog to monitor all GSM type connections and if the go into a bad state, try restart the modemManager service.
We are currently contemplating to going the route of using an onboard modem. Out of curiosity: could you elaborate on what you mean with “behave badly”?
Alex Gonzalez: To address this we are working on a network recovery and fail over mechanism that will extend the current connectivity check so that it can execute custom actions when the connectivity state on specific interfaces fail. This would allow for example to fail over and recover in a scenario such as when a device has both primary and secondary interfaces, the primary connectivity checks fails, the OS fails over to using the secondary interface while it recovers the primary, and once the primary is working again switches back to it.
Please upvote this feature if such a mechanism would be useful for your use case.
Hey Alex, thanks for the answer. This sounds really neat, is there are timeline for this?
Alex Gonzalez: Hi Glenn, no timeline unfortunately but the higher it is in the roadmap the more attention it gets. There is an initial implementation in Network failover and recovery by alexgg · Pull Request #3095 · balena-os/meta-balena · GitHub with some documentation too but it needs further testing and also the addition of automated tests before it can be released.
Any Update? I’ve currently got an onboard modem/Wifi Connect mixture that’s behaving horribly
+1 would love to have this functionality – today we police the modems and interrogate modemmanager pretty aggressively to watch for this issue and issue a system reboot when this happens.