Using mender with unreliable internet connection

General Discussions
1

Hello,

In our setup, we use Mender to udpate devices which have an unreliable access to the internet.

We found several problems with this:

  • If Mender-client cannot connect to the server after a reboot for some time, it will apparently automatically rollback, despite our artifact-commit script saying it’s OK to commit the changes. Is there a way to disable this?
  • After this happens, if we want to attempt re-installing the same update, we have to download it to the device again, which may take several hours on our slow connection. Is there a way the mender-client could keep the latest uploaded artifact so it doesn’t need to re-download it in this case?

We will later be experimenting with delta updates to make the update files smaller, but I don’t know yet if this will be enough and it will certainly not fix the first problem.

Thanks for your help!

2

Not currently. It would be quite dangerous to remove this check in general. There is no way for the client to know whether failure to connect is because of a legitimate network outage or a broken network driver in the new update, so it has to confirm.

I would recommend raising RetryPollIntervalSeconds instead, perhaps in combination with RetryPollCount.