Porting ipcop addons

Porting ipcop addons

[Bob Brewer]

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Hi

I am the author of the adslmonitor addon for ipcop 
(https://sourceforge.net/projects/adslmonitor/) 
 and looking at porting it to ipfire. 

I assume that I would need to use Pakfire to install the addon but I have so 
far been unsuccessful in finding any documentation that would help me modify 
the ipcop addon to be compatible with Ipfire (eg the Ipfire equivalent of 
the Ipcop command  updatemenu.pl which adds the adslmonitor perl scripts to 
the cgi menus).

Could someone could point me to the relevant documentation.

Kind Regards

Bob

Re: Porting ipcop addons

[Michael Tremer]

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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 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?

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.

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.

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

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

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.

I hope that this gives you some good guidance. If you have any further questions
please ask at any time.

Best,
-Michael

On Tue, 2018-01-09 at 15:34 +0000, Bob Brewer wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I am the author of the adslmonitor addon for ipcop 
> (https://sourceforge.net/projects/adslmonitor/) 
>  and looking at porting it to ipfire. 
> 
> I assume that I would need to use Pakfire to install the addon but I have so 
> far been unsuccessful in finding any documentation that would help me modify 
> the ipcop addon to be compatible with Ipfire (eg the Ipfire equivalent of 
> the Ipcop command  updatemenu.pl which adds the adslmonitor perl scripts to 
> the cgi menus).
> 
> Could someone could point me to the relevant documentation.
> 
> Kind Regards
> 
> Bob

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Re: Porting ipcop addons

[Bob Brewer]

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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