The ability to update firmware’s or application containers is essential to secure your system.

Get access to device information

Device information refers to low-level components of your hardware, such as kernel, firmware, containers and other settings such as memory, storage and environment variables. All these can be accessed through a single view in on the Nodes page.

From the Nodes page, click the ACTION button of any one of your online Nodes and select *Device. This will send a request to your Node and open the Device information dialog. The dialog presents four different tabs:

General

This tab reveals common resources such as CPU, Memory and network, all to get a good overview of resource usage, but also a good place to find the IP address of your Node.

Firmware

Yocto based devises, usually comes with two or more kernel partitions. These are manage by a bootloader manager such as RAUC.

The Device information dialog provides detailed information about each partition such as which is active, when it was activated and more.

The Device information dialog also gives you the options of settings which partitions should be booted. You can also update the firmware from this dialog (also available using the microServiceBus API).

Snap (Ubuntu)

If you are running Ubuntu Core or Ubuntu IoT, this is your go-to place for managing Snaps running on your device. The list gives you an overview of all installed Snaps and lets you refresh (update) them by clicking the REFRESH button. Keep in mind that updating Snaps may require rebooting the system.

Although you can update your Snaps using this dialog, you may consider using the microServiceBus API to update more or all devices at once.

Environment variables

Environment variables are a variables whose value is set outside the program, typically through functionality built into the operating system or microservice. An environment variable is made up of a name/value pair, and any number may be created and available for reference at a point in time.

Run scripts

Configuring your system using bash scripts is a powerful and easy way to make sure consistency and integrity of your system is kept.

Bash scripts are created just as you create a microservice, but make sure to Service type of your script to Patch script, as it will otherwise not be visible in the Device information dialog.

With the Patch script created, you can select it in the drop-down list, and click the EXECUTE button to have the script executed on the gateway.