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FAQ

Frequently asked questions about Mender



OPEN SOURCE, PLAN OFFERINGS, COST, AND SCALABILITY

Is the management server open source?

Yes, both the Mender management server and client on the target device are open
source and free to use with a permissive license, Apache 2.0.

We also provide plans where we are responsible for hosting the Mender management
server for you where users can avoid the setup and maintenance costs associated
with running a server infrastructure.

What are your product plan offerings?

Currently Mender has four plan offerings: Free open source, Basic, Professional,
and Enterprise. Mender Open Source offers a robust and secure end-to-end update
manager with client-server architecture and a set of core features. Mender Basic
is an extension of the open source offering with a secure server we host for
you. Mender Professional extends the Basic plan to include commercial
value-added features with a secure server we host for you. Mender Enterprise
extends the capability of the Professional plan with SLA backed support, custom
pricing and customization to meet your unique requirements. Compare the plans
and pricing at mender.io/plans/pricing.

We also offer consulting services.

How well does the Mender server scale, how do I set up the infrastructure for
10,000 devices?

The Mender server is regularly being scale tested in our environment, to ensure
it can scale up to tens to hundreds of thousands devices. Setting up,
optimizing, scaling and ensuring uptime of the server-side infrastructure is
quite complex and environment-specific; device count, update size, frequency,
polling intervals, high availability requirements and bandwidth available are
key drivers for scalability.

We offer various plans where we take responsibility for all of the
aforementioned complexity. With Mender Professional you scale based on your
requirements with a secure server we host for you. For larger and more complex
environments we have Mender Enterprise with SLA level support. See our plans at
plans at mender.io/plans/pricing.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


SECURITY, COMPLIANCE AND LICENSING

Is Mender going through third party security audits?

Yes, given the importance of the security of an OTA tool, Mender is partnering
with a third party security auditing company. Issues are addressed as they are
found.

How does the Mender client-server communication work? Is it secure?

The Mender client regularly polls the Mender server over HTTPS to check for
updates so no ports need to be opened at the Mender client. Only TLS connections
are allowed, the server rejects insecure connections.

To protect against man-in-the-middle attacks, the Mender client stores the
server's TLS certificate during provisioning, e.g. during the build of the
initial Yocto Project image that gets flashed to the device. CA-signed
certificates is also supported.

Do you support hardware keys?

The Mender client can utilize private keys stored in Hardware Security Modules
(HSM) or in Trusted Platform Modules (TPM). This is an additional layer of
security which eliminates storage of private keys (secrets) as plain text files
on the device, making it harder for an attacker to gain access to keys to
impersonate devices.

Is Mender compliant with GPLv3?

Yes, Mender’s license is Apache 2, which is compatible with GPLv3. See the GPL
compatibility page on the Apache.org website for details.

Do you offer integration with certificate authority for TLS?

We provide an enterprise component which acts as mTLS edge proxy / ambassador.
This component can take advantage of the customer’s PKI, use a customer’s
specific TLS server certificate and verify client-side certificates. The mTLS
ambassador can be hosted by the customer.

Can you offer a VPN connection to the Mender hosted server?

We can provide AWS Private Link service end-point from hosted Mender. It is the
responsibility of the customer to set up a VPN from their infrastructure to an
AWS account where the Private Link is connected.

Can Mender Artifacts be encrypted?

No, Mender Artifacts do not support encryption. However it is possible to use
encrypted files as payloads. Customers can write their custom Update Modules to
manage the decryption.

How does Mender handle disk encryption?

It is complicated and therefore normally only encrypts certain files and folders
and not full partition.

How does Mender protect against DoS/DDoS attacks?

The Mender Enterprise server supports configurable API rate limits. When a
device or a user is crossing the rate limit threshold, it will receive the HTTP
status code 429 Too Many Requests. See also the Mender documentation section
about Security.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


SUPPORT, ADDITIONAL HARDWARE AND FIRMWARE/OS REQUIREMENTS

Can I use Mender to target non-linux devices?

No. Mender is currently focused on embedded Linux based operating system
distributions. This is due to the popularity and market demand in using Linux
based systems in creating IoT products and solutions.

How about other embedded Linux distributions like Debian, Ubuntu, Raspbian or
buildroot-based?

While Mender has strong support for the Yocto Project, it also supports the
Debian family of distributions such as Debian and Raspbian.

Mender has also been ported to other build and operating systems like Buildroot
and OpenWRT. Please see the blog posts Porting Mender to a non-Yocto build
system and Notes from a user on Mender without Yocto for examples (note that
some of Mender's needs may have changed since the blog posts were written).

We are also planning to expand the platform support further, please contact us
for help with supporting your OS.

Do you support Android?

No. Linux OS, precisely speaking Linux kernel is the most popular OS for
embedded IoT devices while Android is a framework built on top of Linux kernel.
So every Android device is running Linux kernel but every Linux device doesn’t
have Android. We can think of the Linux kernel as the foundation on which
Android is built.

Does Mender support the Raspberry Pi or other devices?

Yes. Mender has several reference devices, including the BeagleBone Black and
Raspberry Pi 3, as well as a virtual device for testing purposes. These devices
are part of the Mender CI system, are well supported, and you will see
references to them throughout the documentation. Our Get Started guide and UI
tooltips walk you through setting up a Raspberry Pi device with Mender.

Raspberry Pi 3 is supported for full operating system updates running Raspbian
or Yocto Project builds.

For an overview of currently supported devices, please see the Board integration
section of the Mender Hub forum.

Does Mender support using bootloaders other than U-Boot (e.g. GRUB)?

Yes, Mender supports both GRUB and U-Boot. To support atomic rootfs rollback,
Mender integrates with the bootloader of the device. The bootloader system
requirements documentation contains more information on the exact U-Boot
features leveraged.

In the spirit of open source, we would be delighted to give advice and feedback
on implementation questions and pull requests for supporting more bootloaders; a
good place to start is on the Mender Hub forum.

If you do not have time to work on this integration, we also offer board support
services that can help meet all your integration needs.

How about sensors and other smaller devices?

Our strategy to support software updates to these devices is by using Mender on
the gateway as a proxy to deploy remote updates to those smaller devices,
through a variety of network protocols such as ZigBee, Bluetooth low energy and
other local network technologies. With this approach, no agent is required to
run on them.

For an example of how to use Mender to manage software updates for an external
MCU, see this tutorial: How to do a proxy deployment to an FRDM-K64F device
connected to a Raspberry Pi 3

Do you support LXC containers?

It is possible to support LXC containers writing a custom Update Module. You can
refer to the Kubernetes Update Module or the Docker Update Module as starting
points.

What filesystems are supported with A/B operating system updates?

A/B operating system updates work at the block level, thus can work with any
filesystem.

What is Mender support for x86?

Mender client can run on any platform golang can target, including x86.

What filesystem modes are supported?

Read/write; but if doing delta image updates, then read only.

Can AWS communicate with Mender through VPN?

Read/write; but if doing delta image updates, then read only.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


PRODUCT SPECIFIC

Why did you write Mender (the client and server) in Golang instead of C?

There were many trade-offs we considered as we began this project. Ultimately,
we felt that Golang would best benefit the community due to the following:

 * Golang has more core language features and libraries that allows much faster
   development of applications. This means that more Mender features can be
   developed for the community and users much faster than if C was chosen as the
   language
 * The learning curve from C to Golang is very low, given the similarities in
   the language structures, as the co-founder of C (Ken Thompson) is also the
   co-founder of Golang
 * As it is a compiled language, Golang runs natively and very efficiently on
   embedded devices
 * Go is statically linked into a single binary, with no dependencies or
   libraries required at the device
 * Similar in size with C, Go binaries continue to get smaller as their
   compilers get optimized. For example, Go 1.7 reduced the binary size by
   20-30%
 * Go provides wide platform coverage for cross-compilation to support different
   architectures

How many partitions does Mender support on the device?

For dual A/B image updates, Mender requires four partitions: one boot, two root
file systems, and one data partition, as described in the documentation for
partition layout. A *.sdimg file with this reference layout is automatically
generated when building Yocto Project images with meta-mender.

Mender places no upper limit on the number of partitions on your device. Also
see the question on how to create more than four partitions.

How can I create more than four partitions on my device?

Mender comes with a simple *.sdimg generator as part of the meta-mender Yocto
Project layer. The *.sdimg files it outputs has Mender's reference partition
layout with four partitions and is appropriate for flashing to SD cards using dd
for testing and simple production use.

Production devices typically come with their own toolsets for generating and
flashing internal storage like eMMC, e.g. imx-loader, mfg-tool, tegrarcm, or
users are maintaining their own tools. Please refer to these tools on how to use
the generated root file system with your desired partition layout and make sure
to set the appropriate Yocto Project variables to tell Mender where the four
required partitions are, as outlined in the storage documentation.

What is the purpose of the `*.mender` file and what does it contain?

This is a Mender Artifact file which Mender uses to deploy updates. It contains
various metadata required to deploy updates in a robust way, like the device
types supported and version of the Artifact, in addition to the root file system
update itself.

Internally it is packaged as tar archive. The Mender Artifact format is designed
in such a way that multiple updates can be bundled in the same file. See the
documentation on Mender Artifacts for a more detailed description.

The Mender Artifact format also supports package-based updates and updates for
smaller devices.

Is it possible to delay the reboot of the device until the end user confirms?

For many devices with a display that interacts with an end user, it is desirable
to ask the user before applying the update. You have probably seen this on a
smartphone, where it will ask you if you want to update to the latest release of
Android or iOS and it only starts after you hit "Apply".

This is supported by using the state scripting feature of Mender.

Is it possible to do custom health/sanity checks after the update is installed?

Mender automatically rolls back an update if it can not reach the Mender Server
after the update is installed, in order to ensure another update can be
deployed.

State scripting supports adding additional sanity checks to make sure that the
device and applications are working as expected. For example, is the UI
application running and responding within a given amount of time? If not, then
the script can simply return 1 and Mender will roll back the update.

Does Mender stream the update to the partition?

Mender streams the update from the server over HTTPS (or file, if used in
standalone mode), so no temporary space is needed on the device. The checksum is
also computed on the fly during the streaming.

Does Mender resume partial downloads?

Yes, Mender supports resuming downloads through HTTPs range requests. This is
very useful in environments where downloads can get interrupted, e.g. if there
is intermittent wireless network connectivity.

The dual-rootfs approach takes up additional storage, how can this be addressed?

In order to offer generic robust rollbacks, Mender requires two rootfs
partitions, which means effectively doubling the storage requirements for the
rootfs. You can see the full partition layout in the documentation.

The most important design principles of Mender are 1) robustness and 2) ease of
use. Currently, there is no other known approach that provides the generic
robustness and simplicity of the dual rootfs approach. Secondly, the price of
embedded storage is rapidly declining. This is why Mender takes a dual rootfs
approach first.

In the future, other and less robust update mechanisms, such as variations of
packages, tarballs, will be supported as well. Also see the question on
application-level updates, as well as sensors and smaller devices below.

Does Mender support application-level or package-based updates?

Yes, Mender has out-of-the-box support for application updates and use cases
beyond dual A/B full image updates. These use cases include containers (docker),
packages (deb and rpm), files (directory copy/sync), and proxy deployment to
peripheral devices.

How about software updates where cellular network bandwidth is a concern?

Yes. Mender provides a more efficient mechanism for updating software
over-the-air when using cellular networks (e.g. 4G/LTE) with robust delta-based
updates and automatic assignment of delta updates.

Delta updates are included in Mender Professional and Mender Enterprise.

Does the management server push the updates to the clients on the endpoint
devices?

The Mender client pulls the update from the management server. We chose this
approach as it makes Mender work with more network topologies and reduces the
attack surface of the client as no ports are open for Mender at the device.

What is the size of the Mender Client?

The client binaries are about 7 MB in size, or about 4 MB when debug symbols are
stripped. This includes most of the dependencies for the client, such as the
http, TLS, and JSON libraries.

Can we reduce the size of the Mender client?

It is architecture-dependent. The client depends on the LZMA library for
Artifact compression, which is present in most Linux distributions, including
those based on the Yocto Project.

Do you have an integration with any public cloud vendors?

Yes. Mender currently has integration with Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft
Azure IoT. The reference integration ensures the same identity and cryptographic
credentials are used by both Mender and the cloud service provider. Main
benefits of this integration are that you no longer need to manage device
registrations in multiple places, you can easily correlate analytics with past
software update deployments with the Mender server, and you minimize the number
of secret key credentials that need to be handled and protected which makes
security stronger.

Can we run Mender on our own servers?

Yes. Mender server can be installed on any private infrastructure as a
self-managed service. To read documentation for self-managed installations of
the Mender server, visit the documentation page of the latest stable release.

Is it possible to use Mender through APIs?

Yes. The public APIs are split into two types - Device and Management. Device
APIs are for device-originating requests, the Management APIs are intended for
use by the UI and other tools that manage devices, Artifacts or deployments
across devices.

Do you offer Helm charts?

Yes. Read here to learn more about how to use Helm charts with Mender.

Will Mender provide tools for creating a delta image?

You need to generate binary delta Artifacts, and you must start with two full
file system Artifacts. You can use Yocto, mender-convert, or any mechanism of
your choice to create the images. See Create a Delta update Artifact to learn
about the commands.

How can we modify the polling interval?

There are two client configuration parameters that allow controlling the
frequency of communication between the client and the server:
UpdatePollIntervalSeconds and InventoryPollIntervalSeconds. Both parameters are
stored in a configuration file /etc/mender/mender.conf and can be modified to
change the polling intervals.

Can we initiate polling from the backend?

Consult this section of Mender documentation on all the configuration options in
mender.conf

Can you do proxy deployment to other devices with Mender?

Yes. Mender uses a framework called Update Modules to include updates to
peripheral devices. An Update Module is an extension to the Mender client for
supporting a new type of software update, such as a package manager, container,
bootloader and updates of nearby devices such as microcontrollers. Learn more
about how to Create custom Update Modules.

Can you pause and resume artifact download?

You can customize artifact download and installation processes through the use
of state scripts. Mender state scripts can be run between any state transition,
not just before/after the install state and has nine different states as you
transition into a state, “Enter” or out from a state, “Leave”.

Where is the software download stored on the client?

A: Software streams directly to and installs on a disk partition on the device.
The simplest and most robust way to update a device is to write a new file
system image directly to the flash partition. Mender comes with built-in support
for a dual redundant scheme (also known as A/B scheme), which ensures that the
device always comes back to a working state in event of a failure.

How does the U-Boot partition get updated?

Mender provides special integration points for your existing boot code to hook
into so that Mender can be a part of the normal boot process. These integration
points, along with certain required U-Boot features and configuration options,
allow Mender to do safe, automatic updates of the device, with rollback support.
This normally requires patching of stock U-Boot versions, which is what the
automatic process does. Learn more here.

Do you support nested device groupings with Mender?

No. Mender Enterprise instead supports Dynamic groups, which allows you to
define a group based on filters. Dynamic groups allow a single device to appear
in multiple groups which is not possible with hierarchical or nested groups.
This allows much more flexibility to group by both geography and product.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


STANDALONE UPDATES

Can Mender update devices without direct internet access?

Yes. This is done through standalone deployments. Standalone works with Mender
where no Mender server is used and the deployments are triggered at the device,
either manually in the terminal or by custom scripts. This can be useful in
order to deploy updates to devices which do not have network connectivity or are
updated through external storage like a USB stick.

How does standalone mode work?

If you would like to run Mender in standalone mode, you must make sure that the
Mender client does not run as a daemon. In most cases this will entail disabling
or removing any systemd unit that starts the Mender client. Learn more about it
in the Mender documentation.

How do you see the status in standalone updates?

Mender will mark the update as successful and permanent by running this command:
mender -commit. Learn more about it in the Mender documentation.

How do you communicate with the standalone client?

The deployments are triggered at the device, either manually in the terminal or
by custom scripts.

Is it possible to use local updates versus hosted Mender interchangeably?

You can always install artifacts on a device running the Mender client
independently from the server, using the Mender client in stand-alone mode.


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