Re: Porting ipcop addons

[Bob Brewer <ipfire-devel@grantura.co.uk>]

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Hi Michael,

Thank you for your reply it is very helpful.

Michael Tremer wrote:

> Hey Bob,
> 
> thanks for getting in touch.
> 
> I had no idea that too many people are still active around the IPCop
> community, but welcome to IPFire.
> 
I am still running an IPcop firewall but have been looking at IPFire for 
sometime as a replacement to the unsupported IPCop. I released adslmonitor a 
number of years ago which I had developed it for my own use to analyze my 
rather flaky adsl connection and hoped it would be of use to others with the 
same problem. I have made a number of changes over the years to support vdsl 
routers using ssh or telnet access but haven't released any updates as yet.

I was thinking that I would release an updated version for IPFire  if I 
could get it running on my own test box first but I see that your addons 
follow a different path to IPCop addons so was trying to understand what is 
involved.
 
> I guess this would be a great addition to IPFire although I could not find
> out which modems are supported. Is there any (bigger?) ISP handing out any
> compatible ones?
> 
In my original version I parsed the adsl data from the router's web pages 
with a regex. The problem here is that each different manufacturer need a 
different regex. Hopefully accessing the modem/router with ssh or telnet 
should make data collection less complex.

> I had a look at the code that you linked and that looks quite good. It's
> clean and tidy and I think porting that over would not be too hard.
> However, we don't run the perl scripts any more to collect stats. We use
> collectd in IPFire 2.
> 

I've made a start and have the first web page (router.cgi) running on my 
IPFire test system. There weren't many problems mainly changing file 
locations from IPCop defaults to the IPFire ones.

> Since we should not run the cron job to collect data for every since even
> when it doesn't have a compatible device, we should make this an add-on.
>
I agree.
 
> What you will need to do is check out the build system as described here:
> 
>   https://wiki.ipfire.org/devel/ipfire-2.x/build-howto
> 
> Then you would have to create a file called lfs/adslmonitor or something
> similar and roughly follow these steps:
> 
>   https://wiki.ipfire.org/devel/ipfire-2.x/addon-howto
> 
Thanks for the links.

> I guess a good example to follow would be guardian which is also an add-on
> written in perl:
> 
>   
https://git.ipfire.org/?p=ipfire-2.x.git;a=blob;f=lfs/guardian;h=f3001c82128f3ba08290eea295b87cf342f65590;hb=HEAD
> 
OK  

> To add a button to the navigation, you will have to add a file with some
> information to /var/ipfire/menu.d. They are here in the source:
> 
>   
https://git.ipfire.org/?p=ipfire-2.x.git;a=tree;f=config/menu;h=64cd8c17713574e84a7012803f3261b8a8e81801;hb=HEAD
> 
> Just dropping a file into that directory will do it.
> 
OK I'll try to make the changes this way but on my test system I just hacked 
the /var/ipfire/menu.d/20-status.menu and added an extra item. Different to 
what I was used to in IPCop which uses a 'MENUENTRY' item in the perl script 
header. 

> I hope that this gives you some good guidance. If you have any further
> questions please ask at any time.
> 
> Best,
> -Michael
> 
Thanks again for your really useful reply, I am also running a few other 
prototype addons on my IPCop which could be ported over. One of these sends 
the daily firewall logs to dshield and another is a hack of the old IPCop 
Banish addon which is under development.

Let me know if you think these could be useful to IPFire

Kind Regards


Bob