OpenBalena
OpenBalena is "open source software to manage connected IoT devices". We use it to manage our fleet of Raspberry PIs.
As this is an internal-facing service we run it under the balena.dgcsdev.com domain.
| You can ssh directly into the above domain without needing to know which underlying server is running it. |
Interface
There is no user interface for OpenBalena, just the command line.
The public docs for the Balena CLI cover well enough how to interact with it. However! There is also a custom script - in the smc-balena repo - which wraps the CLI with:
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An automatic login for our OpenBalena server
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Some scripts for common multi-step procedures
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Automatic switching between our OpenBalena server and the BalenaCloud servers for the commands which only work with BalenaCloud (e.g. the image downloads)
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Some additional queries/commands which utilise OpenBalena’s http server that are not (easily) available in the CLI directly
See the smc-balena readme for usage details.