pingr

Pingr is a project to help monitor remote network connections by deploying a small monitoring program at the remote site (could be on an embedded device, a raspberry pi or a mac or linux PC) connected via the connection (Wifi or Ethernet) you want to monitor.

It regularly will send reports to a web service, and if a report is missed, then the service will mark the device as "offline" and the connection as offline.

Connections status can then be monitored via an app and the user alerted that something is wrong with their connection and some maintenance action maybe needed.

It can also measure network strength and quality and send qualitative metrics on the connection.

collectr

collectr is a cloud service that receives the reports from monitoring programs/devices.

The current implementation is a cloudflare worker in rust, using Durable Objects.

Status is saved to the cloudflare key-value store and maybe queried to see device and connection state.

I'm pending approval for cloudflare's Beta Pub/Sub service to be able to use that both to send reports, as well as subscribe to status change events for devices and connections.

The following sections on developing collectr require that you install cloudflare's development tools, including wrangler

Building collectr

You can build collectr using

npx wrangler build

Running collectr locally

npx wrangler dev

If you want to run a local wimon against this running version of collectr then you will need to edit the wimon.toml file in the wimon directory something like this:

#<removed text>
base_url = "http://localhost:8787"
#base_url = "https://collectr.mackenzie-serres.workers.dev"
#<removed text>

Deploying collectr to cloudflare's network

npx wrangler deploy

wimon

wimon (can be pronounced with a Scottish or Jamaican accept :-) ) is a small "wifi monitoring" command line application, which when run on a remove device will send regular reports to collector.

Building wimon

You can build wimon using

cd wimon
cargo build

Building wimon on Raspberry Pi

libssl headers are required, install with:

sudo apt-get install libssl-dev

Running wimon

You can run the wimon binary with the standard options using:

cd wimon
cargo run

Wimon Config

Currently wimon looks for a config file called wimon.toml in the directory where it is executed, and then it searches all the parent directories between that directory and root looking for the same config file, stopping as soon as one is found. Then it loads the config from there. This may change in the future.

Installing wimon as a service (Macos, Linux, Window)

To install wimon as a background service (and start it immediately) that is also re-started at boot, execute it with the "install" command:

sudo cargo run -- install

Uninstalling wimon as a service (Macos, Linux, Window)

To remove the installed wimon background service (after stopping it first) execute it with the "uninstall" command:

sudo cargo run -- uninstall

Check the status of service on linux

You can check the current status and get last output using:

systemctl status mackenzie-serres-pingr.wimon.service

which should return something like:

     Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/mackenzie-serres-pingr.wimon.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
     Active: active (running) since Fri 2024-01-19 12:28:13 CET; 2min 0s ago
   Main PID: 2619 (wimon)
      Tasks: 2 (limit: 414)
        CPU: 618ms
     CGroup: /system.slice/mackenzie-serres-pingr.wimon.service
             └─2619 /home/andrew/workspace/pingr/target/debug/wimon

Jan 19 12:28:13 pizerow0 systemd[1]: Started mackenzie-serres-pingr.wimon.
Jan 19 12:28:13 pizerow0 wimon[2619]: Config file loaded from: "/home/andrew/workspace/pingr/wimon.toml"
Jan 19 12:28:13 pizerow0 wimon[2619]: Monitor: Connection
Jan 19 12:28:15 pizerow0 wimon[2619]: Sent OnGoing report to: collectr.mackenzie-serres.workers.dev
Jan 19 12:28:15 pizerow0 wimon[2619]: Response: Device ID: c6426011b76adc13c41ffd737c0a07b2495f59a2bc94f725d26>
Jan 19 12:29:17 pizerow0 wimon[2619]: Sent OnGoing report to: collectr.mackenzie-serres.workers.dev
Jan 19 12:29:17 pizerow0 wimon[2619]: Response: Device ID: c6426011b76adc13c41ffd737c0a07b2495f59a2bc94f725d26>

Testing wimon

Test wimon locally using

cargo test

Supported platforms

Currently wimon has been tested to run on:

macos
linux (ubuntu)
raspberry pi 4 (Pi400 in fact) with Raspberry Pi OS
raspberry pi zero (W - with wifi) with Raspberry Pi OS

andrewdavidmackenzie / pingr