[yocto] Remote management of embedded devices

[Mark O'Donovan]

We're experimenting with software called yalertunnel (yaler.net).
It causes embedded devices to maintain a connection to a relay server
through which they can be accessed. We are using a 3g broadband
dongle with no static ip or port forwarding and results have been quite
good. We have been using it only for accessing our web-interface but
they also support ssh.

Regards,
Mark

On Fri, Mar 7, 2014 at 1:41 PM, Bryan Evenson <bevenson at melinkcorp.com>wrote:

> Alex,
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: yocto-bounces at yoctoproject.org [mailto:yocto-
> > bounces at yoctoproject.org] On Behalf Of Alex J Lennon
> > Sent: Friday, March 07, 2014 7:30 AM
> > To: yocto at yoctoproject.org
> > Subject: [yocto] Remote management of embedded devices
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > I'm looking into remote management solutions for an upcoming headless
> > mesh edge router running Poky. I think, at least in the initial rollout
> we're
> > going to need something more than, say, a cron-based package update
> > facility.
> >
> > I'm currently thinking of going down the route of a cloud based server
> > providing SSH port forwarding to the embedded devices, and then perhaps
> > putting some scripting together on top of that to enable monitoring,
> > configuration, and control.
>
> This is similar to what we have running.  We're using opkg for the package
> management system and allow firmware upgrade through the USB stick or
> through remote access.  We have an SSH server for remote access, and each
> device has its own private key for access into the server.  If the device
> is in the middle of an SSH session with the remote access server, we can
> then SSH into the device from our server if we want to do some deeper
> diagnostics on an issue with a device.  We have separate HTTP server which
> each device queries to see if it needs to check in.  So instead of having
> to do an ssh login each time to check if there's a firmware upgrade
> available, it just needs to do a HTTP GET to see if there's firmware
> available or if we want to check on its status.
>
> The biggest issues we've had have been due to our network setup and
> handling upgrade both through the network and the USB stick.  We are using
> "opkg upgrade --download-only" as the first step of the upgrade process to
> make sure that we don't do a partial upgrade.  opkg-0.1.8 doesn't do
> --download-only for file:// sources; why download a file that is already on
> the filesystem?  So I had to add a patch so it would download files from
> the USB stick.  We also had an issue with DNS names because the server has
> a different name when the device finds it locally on our intranet then when
> it connects remotely, so we had to setup separate mirrors.  Other than that
> it's been working pretty well.
>
> I'd also love to hear other people's solutions to see if they have done
> something similar or came up with a different solution.
>
> Regards,
> Bryan
>
> >
> > I was wondering if there are better solutions already supported by the
> Yocto
> > project which people might be using to good effect in production systems
> ?
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Alex
> >
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