Science/Engineering/Technical forums

Ah, now I remember - that's why I got going with dropbox as it was the lowest hassle way to get stuff onto the tab from a bigger machine. Thanks for the reminder.

I've reworked the "tellem" part of this to survive temporary loss of a connection, and to write to a log file in /tmp. This has turned out to be required for wireless use around here...I'll probably shine it up a little further as time goes on, it's been a really handy tool that seems to "jiggle" the "mainstream" networking code most people depend on to work better in marginal cases as well...

Not to get into the endless flame war, but the premature adoption of systemd in linux has caused issues with my automated install of these, so I no longer use it.
Hey debian - you don't have to follow the herd, there's no shame in waiting for something to work before kind of jamming it down our throats, it used to be your outstanding quality to not do things like that until they were stable (in this case, given past history from that author, maybe never). Just copy the main programs to someplace like /usr/bin and add them to /etc/rc.d to be run as root at startup...that's all my install did anyway. As usual, this particular author (Poettering for systemd - remember how "great" pulseaudio was, his other major work?) has made things incompatible with his previous abortion, again...



I guess the final polish would be to look at the $debug variable before opening the log file, and in the loggit() function and do nothing if it's not set. No biggie here so far, which is why I haven't done it yet. I find that in an otherwise really good situation (15 feet from a WAP and using a 5 dbi antenna on a pi) - wireless goes down about twice a day when checked about once a minute - no huge files are produced.

Combining all the improvements, and even overcoming systemd breaking things, here's the latest and greatest. I've also got a version of tellem for ESP8266s in C that interoperates just fine, and allows you to append useful info to the hostname which otherwise is just ESP_somehex, where somehex is the last 3 bytes of its MAC address, and no, you can't change that for all services, though there are many threads on the web that claim you can. Funny that they nearly all try something different, and none of them work here.

To use this (FWIW, it's linux only...) you copy tellem and tellme to /usr/bin/ and go there and say chmod 6711 tellem (and repeate for tellme). They gotta go somewhere, and this is a good somewhere that matches what's in the .service files.
Those go into /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/"*.service" which systemd reads at startup to find out what to start, and when to start it - it broke starting these in /etc/rc.local by starting them before networking was up - which the older init figured out on its own, along with mounting shares (which is another whole rant - systemd fails with shares in /etc/fstab and arrogantly says "don't do that, won't-fix" - where the original init systems handled it fine, now systemd fails, and also won't allow the system to shut down because it can't unmount what it never mounted...).

At any rate, that's another post, and this thread is for LANDNS that just works and handles easily machines that come and go a lot (which happens here off the grid when you shut down whatever you aren't using right now). And here's the goodies for linux. I'll add some for ESP at some point - that works fine too.

Unzip this in your arduino sketchbook folder and bingo. It's just the basics of over the air updates and my tellem code (where you can add a suffix to the hostname to help remember what's what).

Nothing else - the rest is "your code goes here". Good boilerplate.