Installing Cron on Lora Gateway OS

1

Hi

I’m new to absolutely everything to do with LoRA, Loraserver etc.

But I’m extremely glad that I found LoraServer, because it has allowed me to rapidly adopt this great technology set, which is crucial to our business.

Thank you to all involved, for this great project, and all the excellent documentation and software. It is greatly appreciated.

Using all of that, we have a Lorix One loaded with the full Lora Gateway OS image running successfully and are in the process of testing. So far everything is going well.

I have implemented the Postgres integration and that seems to be working fine as well. This fits our existing IoT network and systems very well and we should have minimal difficulty integrating the Lorix One gateways into our existing (quite extensive) IoT network.

However I have some queries which are potentially quite important to our use case:

  1. We have quite a lot of experience using Raspberry Pi’s in our existing network for data gathering/processing/storage on our various sites. We find that a few things are good practice to achieve acceptable reliability out of the Pi’s. One of which is periodically rebooting the Pi from a crontab. However I see that there is no easy way to install cron services on the Lora Gateway OS. I am not a Linux specialist and can only perform the normal basic common line manipulations. So could someone please guide me, assuming very limited skill on my part, on how to go about installing cron services on the Lora Gateway OS. Think this is an important requirement because I have noticed that the Lorix One has become unresponsive a few times during testing and required a power down to restart it. We experience the same issues, occasionally with the Pi’s in the field, and have found that a periodic automated reboot solves a multitude of small issues. We do the same to all our modems out in the field as well BTW.

  2. Further to point 1) above, it would help significantly to my class of user if the apt service was installed as standard on the OS. Are there any plans to do that in the future? That way we would not have bug you guys for new packages etc to be included all the time.

Any assistance would be very welcome.

Regards
Alan

2

It seems that my question wasn’t very interesting?

I also need to load NTP, which I see is also not available.

Any suggestions would really be appreciated

3

I think the easiest would be to customize the image with the packages you need.

E.g. when you are using the -base image, you can add additional packages to this file: https://github.com/brocaar/lora-gateway-os/blob/master/meta/recipes-core/images/lora-gateway-os-base.bb

The README in the root of that repository has documentation with regards to generating the images.

4

Thanks very much, I will try that and report back here how it goes.

5

Where do I find the full OS image .bb file for the Lorix One?

As far as I can tell, on the Git repository you referenced it only has those files which are intended for a Raspberry Pi 3? How do I know what the existing .bb file includes for the Lorix One?

Also to make the changes do I run the commands listed on the Lorix One via SSH? Is that where the Docker container resides? (Excuse my ignorance I’m having to try learn on the fly here).

6

The repository is for both the Pi and LORIX One gateways :slight_smile: See https://github.com/brocaar/lora-gateway-os/#configuration, in these files you will be able to set the (meta-wifx BPS layer and then the LORIX One 256 or 512 MB target machine).

7

Must admit this looks daunting, don’t really know where to start?

I think what I need is apt installed, so I can upload everything else normally. But how do do that? just add apt \ to the bb file? I doubt it’s that simple? What about all the dependencies that apt may have?