Wissh

An experimental tool for diagnosing offline balena devices.

Status: On early stages of design and development. Hardly usable at the moment. This is an experiment, not an officially supported balena tool.

Vision

We are still forming the vision for this tool. As of February 2023, it goes more or less like this:

• A Field Technician Toolkit for balena devices.
• Especially for devices that are offline and therefore cannot be troubleshoot through balenaCloud.
• Helps to figure out why a device is offline and bring it back online.

How can I add a new check?

There are two steps:

1. Implement check. In summary, a check is anything that implements the wissh.Check interface. We keep checks under pkg/checks, one check per file.
2. Add your check to the list of checks to execute. Just add it to the checks.All() function, in pkg/checks/check_list.go.

For an example, take a look at pkg/checks/ping_api.go which is a simple one. For a more complex example, check pkg/checks/static_ip_config.go: this one does a good amount of processing on the data obtained via SSH to check for issues.

Building

This is currently being developed under Linux. It should be buildable for all major operating systems, but I am afraid I currently cannot provide instructions for anything other than Linux. (If you want to try building for other platforms and contribute with instructions, please be my guest!)

Linux

Dependencies:

• A recent Go installation; version 1.19 or above should be fine.
• A C compiler (we use Fyne for the GUI, which uses cgo).
• Some tools and libraries we depend upon (see below).

If you are running Ubuntu, installing these packages should suffice:

apt-get install ca-certificates golang git libx11-dev libxcursor-dev libxrandr-dev libxinerama-dev libxi-dev libgl-dev libxxf86vm-dev

To actually build, just issue

go build ./cmd/wissh-gui