Mender Remote Terminal Unavailable?

General Discussions
1

Hi,

Late last year we setup some RPi4s and enrolled them under Hosted Mender with mender-connect installed and the troubleshoot addon, all looked to be fine we’d see the units check into Mender on the Dashboard and could remote in using terminal

We’ve since sent those units to another site and whilst they are seen checking in to Mender the option for remote terminal is no longer present on the device page

Are there any specific network settings required for remote terminal access such as Firewall rules to set?

Many thanks,
Alex

2

The terminal is using the same connection as the client, over a websocket, so this should not be an issue.

However, previous versions have had some issues with a race condition when it is started up.

Can you try and restart the mender-connect systemd service?

3

I’ll check again next time the system is power cycled, unfortunately I don’t have direct access to them at present

I can see the 4 RPi’s checking in to Mender every 8 hours or so, but I take it the terminal service won’t restart by itself if the startup issue was present on boot?

Although without knowing the specifics, it seems odd for all four to encounter it simultaneously

Thanks,
Alex

4

Yes, I agree - that is odd indeed.

Have you tried connecting to a device with mender-cli? GitHub - mendersoftware/mender-cli: A general-purpose CLI for the Mender backend

5

Sorry for the late reply

I’ve seen a few of the pi’s expose terminal access but it seems very sporadic, similar with check-ins to Mender itself, i.e only 2 out of 4 are checking in. My test system is fine and checks in without complaint so I’m leaning towards the network setup on site.

The on site firewalls are very restrictive from my understanding and work via ip whitelists, I assume the pi’s are trying to connect to hosted.mender.io?

Is there a fixed IP address that could be added to the firewall for mender.io or is it rotating/dynamic?

I’ve also noticed when trying the terminal that the NTP service was being blocked so the system clock is incorrect, was wondering if that may cause issues as well if correct times are needed for interacting with Mender?

Thanks again

6

This is correct.

Not fixed unfortunately.

It could cause issues with the certificate I’m pretty sure, so better have this working correctly.