Re-triggering console-conf?

device
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I have a raspberry pi running ubuntu core. It was all setup fine at home on my LAN. I have brought i to the office and need to configure it on the LAN here. It’s not connected to the network yet, so I think i need to re-run console-conf. I’ve connected to it over a serial console and see the following:-

Ubuntu Core 16 on <no ip address> (ttyS0)

You cannot log in until the system has an IP address.
(Is there supposed to be a DHCP server running on your network?)

How do I re-trigger this?

@ogra suggested I delete /writable/system-data/var/lib/console-conf/complete but that file doesn’t exist. Any ideas how I can re-trigger the setup of this Pi again?

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@mwhudson, @mvo any suggestions?

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Hi @popey - thanks for bringing this up, this is an interesting use-case, we should probably support a more direct approach directly via the console-conf message to reconfigure the network. Input from @mwhudson would be most welcome here.

The console-conf-wrapper script will check if the device is managed and only trigger console-conf if the device is not managed. Unfortunately there is no trivial way to reset the managed state, you would have to modify /writable/system-data/var/lib/snapd/state.json. So the best option is probably put the board into “debug” mode (see How to put the dragonboard into "debug" mode) and then run console-conf manually from the root shell via serial console.

Sorry that there is currently no simpler way.

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Yes, afaik this is a gap currently. How should this work? If someone can come up with a design, I or someone else can probably implement it…

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First of all it sound like the use case here doesn’t want for the device to get back to unmanaged, OTOH we don’t have network nor a password setup I suppose? all we have is ssh keys but not way to ssh connect?

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Exactly.

I am sat at the device, and cannot use it at all. I can plug a display and keyboard in, but cannot login, because we don’t enable local logins by default, and I didn’t have the forethought to set a password for my account. if there was wired network available, I might be able to get a cable and get online that way, then ssh in over ethernet and setup wifi that way (this is what I ended up doing). But in some situations it’s not practical.

If I could plug a USB key in with some special file on it, or modify a simple text file on the SD card to make it connect to a specific wireless network, that might be a decent enough workaround.

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