# Our journey to mender

**URL:** https://hub.mender.io/t/our-journey-to-mender/5227
**Category:** General Discussions
**Created:** [September 3, 2022, 3:50pm UTC](https://hub.mender.io/t/our-journey-to-mender/5227 "2022-09-03T15:50:04Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Page:** 1

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### Author: ![patrick.florek](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex036/user_avatar/hub.mender.io/patrick.florek/32/1706_2.png) [@patrick.florek](https://hub.mender.io/u/patrick.florek)
#### Post date: [September 3, 2022, 3:50pm UTC](https://hub.mender.io/t/our-journey-to-mender/5227/1 "2022-09-03T15:50:04Z")

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Hey together,

for our product a battery and charger management solution we were looking for an OTA-Update solution and finally got mender successfully to run end-to-end.

While doing the testing with hosted Mender and a base image it worked instant. The final migration to Mender on AWS EKS and our own golden image had some pain points.

- **U-Boot** configuration for Raspberry PI3 didn’t work out-of-the box, it was hard to figure out why
  - `dtoverlay=disable-bt` in config.txt fails because RPI3 firmware and U-Boot are doing somehow same stuff  
Configure U-Boot to load device tree from RPI only by replacing `CONFIG_OF_EMBED=y` by `CONFIG_OF_BOARD=Y` in the defconfig
  - Using a PI hat or anything on the uart interrupts U-Boot so that is doesn’t proceed booting the kernel  
Update U-Boot to a more recent version and disable U-Boot to wait for serial port. Add `CONFIG_BOOTDELAY=-2` to the defconfig

- **Mender Convert** worked like a charm
  - It still needs a check, if mender client is installed on the golden image, mender convert will just fail
  - Documentation and source code are a little bit out of sync, but the source is still good to read
  - The variable for passing a custom U-Boot should be configurable

- **Mender Helm Chart** was also easy to deploy to AWS EKS via AWS CDK
  - I was a little bit sad, that the Helm Chart doesn’t support existing secrets. I just had to install [ESO](https://external-secrets.io/v0.5.9/) to load the certs from AWS SecretsManager. It only took some time
  - I still haven’t figured out, how to pass mongo url, username and password as separate values to the pods. But this only a matter of style
  - The mender deployments service has a bug where it doesn’t use our s3 service account to connect to AWS S3 _(have forgotten at which point, I assume it’s related to the file storage factory in the golang code of that service, which is also doing a list of buckets, idk what’s purpose it has)_. Setting up an IAM user with AWS Access Key is a little bit annoying, since one has to maintain a key rotation policy

- **API Gateway**
  - I haven’t figured out, what are the desired values for the websocket. ALB idle timeout and stickiness duration of the target group?

- **Contributing**
  - I’m a bit sad, while solving the above problems, I didn’t found any time to invest into the custom contributing process, which is not just open a GitHub Issue or Pull Request

Many many thanks for this great product and the high quality source code 😍 and big cudos 🚀