Dark-Alex-17I made a little daemon to let me remotely control servers over the mesh with no internet access required
I made a little daemon to let me remotely control servers over the mesh with no internet access required - Lemmy.World
So I picked up my first Meshtastic device about 4 months ago. It’s become a problem ever since! But one thing I really wanted to get out of Meshtastic was a way to reduce my reliance on my ISP for accessing and controlling my homelab. I wanted a way to SSH into my servers and diagnose or fix things without needing to rely on my ISP at all. So, that naturally gave way to the idea of MeshExec [https://github.com/Dark-Alex-17/meshexec] — MeshExec is a little binary that attaches to your serially-connected Meshtastic node, and looks for messages in a specified private channel for aliases to execute. Then it will execute whatever commands you specify and automatically chunk them and send them back through the mesh in a staggered fashion. This chunking is done to both fit inside the max message size that Meshtastic supports, and so that the mesh is not overwhelmed with messages and drops them. [https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/d12796c9-dde9-4225-90b1-84885f2402f3.jpeg] [https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/0567aef4-2640-420a-a62f-71eafa0a99ef.png] [https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/5fb20ecd-8cc3-4736-b38f-4060a5ad3714.png] You define the aliases, the shell used to execute the commands, etc. So you can basically use it to do whatever you want over the mesh! I’ve set up a handful of aliases to do simple diagnostics on my homelab servers. Things like restarting docker containers, checking the top 3 processes consuming the most memory, etc. I decided to use aliases because I figured direct shell access to a server is SUPER dangerous, especially if you accidentally attach the daemon to a public channel. — No idea if this will be useful to anyone else, but I made it as easy to use as possible if anyone does want to use it. Here’s the link to the repo [https://github.com/Dark-Alex-17/meshexec] if anyone wants to give it a go. I just wanted to share how I’ve been using Meshtastic and gone full-prepper to have control over my homelab (or local-only Home Assistant) without needing an ISP. If anyone decides to give this a try, I’d love to know your thoughts or answer any questions you have! Happy meshing!
Fred F4EED/KI7QQP
Gaulix
