Raymond P. Burkholder - Things I Do

I picked up a zigbee controller and was going to attach it to me BeagleBoard. Zigbee2MQTT. Recent installs of Zigbee2MQTT require recent versions of node.js, which the latest BeagleBoard operating system can't quite yet supply.

I did have an espressobin sitting around. After reviewing it's capabilities, it looks feasible. But it needed an operating system update.

I needed to boot it up to see what flavour it is. A couple of startup notes:

• It requires more power than what the USB can provide, so even though there is a green light lit on the board when the USB cable is inserted, the power adapter must be connected as well.
• command to start a console: screen /dev/ttyUSB0 115200
• The startup text showed I had a version with 1G memory, 1000Mhz CPU, 800 Mhz memory
• The starting page with cryptic notes: Espressobin
• I first needed to reflash the boot loader. This required downloading from /dl/espressobin/u-boot with my boot file being flash-image-DDR3-1g_2cs_2-1000_800.bin and placing the file on a vfat SD
• booting up the espressobin, and starting the boot prompt, the boot flash could be installed with:
• bubt flash-image-DDR3-1g_2cs_2-1000_800.bin spi usb
• from my linux desktop, I downloaded Armbian Bookworm and imaged to an SD card with: sudo dd if=Downloads/Armbian_23.5.1_Espressobin_bookworm_current_5.15.113_minimal.img of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1M status=progress
• A reboot started Debian and entered in to the initial configuration process.
• a line in /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/10-ignore-interfaces.conf needed to be commented out to be able to manage the interfaces (networking in this espressobin build may not be fully baked), and NetworkManager restarted

Espressobin Reference:

• Documentation
• Community

References

• systemd-networkd - from archlinux, with reference to systemd-nspawn for container networking. -- interesting note: "it is possible to run Docker containers inside an unprivileged systemd-nspawn container with cgroups v2 enabled". But from an old talk:
  • Creating containers with systemd-nspawn - It is targeted at "building, testing, debugging, and profiling", not at deployment. systemd-nspawn uses the same kernel APIs that the other two tools use, but is not a competitor to them because it is not targeted at running in a production environment.

Gone are the good 'ole days of using /etc/network/interfaces to manage basic networking stack configurations. There seems to be an explosion of alternate ways, each stepping on each other's toes: /etc/network/interfaces, NetworkManager, NetPlan, systemd-networking, ...

A problem I had the other day was where a new installation of an espressobin had NetworkManager installed, no NetPlan, and some stuff in /etc/network/interfaces. Unfortunately, since NetworkManager controls the dhcp-client, the /etc/network/interfaces interface was not obtaining an address.

The solution was to edit /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/10-ignore-interfaces.conf, and comment the following line:

[keyfile] #unmanaged-devices=interface-name:eth*,interface-name:wan*,interface-name:lan*,interface-name:br*

After 'sudo service NetworkManager restart', this solves the error of NetworkManager not being able to manage strictly unmanaged interfaces, which for the espressobin, are lan0, lan1, wan.

Some commands for NetworkManager:

• nmcli
• nmcli device show
• nmcli connection show

File locations:

• /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/ - interface configurations
• /usr/share/doc/network-manager/README.Debian - notes about managed/unmanaged devices

Some references:

• Debian NetworkManager - mostly desktop?
• Debian NetworkConfiguration - nostly server?
• NetworkManager homepage
• nmcli - command-line tool for controlling NetworkManager
• NetworkManager.conf - NetworkManager configuration file
• NetworkManager - archlinux view of NetworkManager, with a section on VPN connectivity based upon profiles