Advanced Meshtastic - Remote Node Administration

what's up everyone and welcome back to the coms Channel now if you've been a subscriber for a while you probably remember the solar mesh tastic build we tackled 6 months ago since then I've been tinkering away in the workshop making some improvements to it while also finding a way to make it more cost effective in an upcoming video I'll break down all the upgrades and improvements but for now we're taking one of these updated devices to a remote off-grid location and before we deploy it we want to set it up to where we can send commands to it remotely and make any necessary changes from the comfort of Home join me for today's video and learn as we go through the steps needed to get this device configured for Remote Management and offgrid [Music] locations we're approaching a restricted area restricted are is one mile West now let me start off by saying that this isn't a requirement to use mesh tastic or to have a device in a remote location in most cases it should be fine to deter determine what configuration you want your Remote device to have configure it and then go ahead and deploy it but for those of you that do want the ability to remotely configure a device or just have the ability to do so in the future this video is for you to do this we're going to need to have the mesh tastic python command line interface installed my previous video goes through this but if you've stumbled upon this video before seeing that I'll include a link to that video in the video description below sending commands to remote devices happens over a channel called admin so the first step we're going to have to go through is setting up this admin channel one thing to note though while we're on the topic of channels in a recent video we went over setting up channels in our own private channels with our own encryption keys this is primarily for our personal devices that we'll be using as clients this type of setup is not needed for remote devices like repeaters or routers and it's actually best not to have these devices set up this way this is because if you have a Remote device setup with all of your encrypted channels that get stolen that means that your network is now compromised since that device has all of your encryption keys on it devices will rebroadcast all packets even for channels that doesn't have the encryption keys for so having remote devices with channels and encryption Keys really isn't necessary all that's required is that the device be on the same lur settings so as I mentioned we need to set up an admin Channel and in order for remote access to be enabled there must also be a primary channel for this video we're using a freshly setup device that has not had anything done to it other than selecting a region setting a name and setting the device role of router so this device currently only has the default long fast Channel set up on it and that's fine for our needs as that is a primary Channel by default so we're good to go there and can begin the process we're going to start off by connecting the device we'll be deploying at the remote location to our computer here using the US USB cable then let's add the admin Channel and to do this we'll go ahead and open up Powershell and then run the command mesh tastic space-- c-ad space admin then we can go and hit enter and once that's done its thing we should now have the admin Channel added to the device and we can confirm this by running the command mesh tastic D- info and just make sure you have the spaces where you see them when I type in these commands so we'll give it a moment to connect and collect the info and we'll see towards the bottom where we have a channel section with our primary Channel and our secondary Channel named admin we also have a couple of URLs here one is just for the primary Channel and then the second one called complete URL is for all channels we're going to need to copy this second URL labeled all channels for use on our local device so let's go ahead and do that by highlighting the URL here and then right click on it to copy it at this point the Remote device is ready to go and we can go ahe and disconnect it from the USB cable now we're ready to prepare our local device that will be sending the commands to the remote device with for that I'll be using my Teo here but you can use any device that supports mesh tastic of course so we'll hook up our local device to the computer now and if our local device doesn't already have additional channels all that's needed to get the local device ready is to run the command mesh tastic D- set URL and then hit the space bar and we'll paste the URL we copied by right clicking on the PO shell window here and then we can go and hit enter so that's all you have to do if you don't have any additional channels already set up on your device if you do already have channels set up like in my case here you will lose your other channels if you enter in this command I just ran with the URL to avoid losing the channels we've set up previously we need to go about this a different way so first let's hop on the Android app and go to the three dot menu on the top right then select radio configuration and then channels then here you can see we have three channels total and each of these numbers on the left is the channel index number we need to figure out what the next available Channel index number is and in my case the next one available is three but yours may be different depending on how many channels you have so back to the Powershell window let's copy the psk for the admin Channel and that will be everything between the quotes here but be sure not to copy the quotes So once you got that copied we can run the command mesh tastic D- ch- set name admin then Dash Das CH Dash set psk then base 64 then a colon and then we can go ahead and right click on the PO shells window here and that will paste the psk we just copied then go and hit the space bar and then we want to finish off the command with D- CH Dash index and now we want to enter in whatever the next available Channel index number was which in my case is three but go and put over whatever your next available Channel index number is so once you've got that in there go and hit enter and we'll wait for that to do its thing and once that is done we'll need to confirm that the new admin channel is now on our local device by running the command mesh tastic D- info then go and hit enter and here we can see the admin channel is listed under the channels section here now so we're good to go there but now we need to get the node ID of our remote node so we know which device to send the commands to and we'll do this by running the command and mesh tastic D- nodes then here we can see a list of nodes our devices seen and then we can see the remote node listed here now this number in the ID column is the node ID that we'll need in order to send commands to it so let's go ahead and copy that by highlighting it and right clicking on it so with that copied we're now ready to test out our first remote command and you can remotely run just about any of the commands that you can run locally with the python command line interface just be careful that you don't run commands that will potentially cause you to lose access to your node or even worse make it drop completely off the network so to specify what node you want to send a command to you just use the dash dashd argument and then the rest of the command you want to send to so so let's do a basic example where we get the lower configuration of the node and run the command mesh tastic d-d and then we'll paste in the node ID here now if you're on lenux or Mac you need to put the node ID in single quotes like this but since this is Windows that isn't required though so we can just leave the quotes off on Windows but for lenux and Mac you need to put in those single quotes so let's go ahead and finish up the command and put in dash dash getet Laur then we can hit enter so it'll connect to the device remotely and send the command and we should get the lore information for the node if all went well so if all went well and that worked we're good to go and can now configure it remotely after we deploy it again just be careful not to send any commands that'll cause you to lose connection to it otherwise you'll have to go to the remote site to fix it but let's do another example though let's say we've deployed our Remote device got home and realized oh crap we forgot to change the name of our node and it's still named remote node test if we look at the user config section on the mesh tastic docs page we can see the command change the name here now this is the command we would need to fix this if the device was connected to the computer via USB but to fix this remotely we'll just add the Das Dash desk and then the node ID to the command so let's go and try that out so let's run the command mesh tastic and dash dashd then we'll paste in our node ID here then-- set- owner and then put in a single quote and then we'll type in the name that we want to use for the Remote device and and once we got that in put in another single quote at the end of it then we can hit space bar and then dash dash set Dash owner Dash short then we'll need a single quote and then we'll put in the short name and for this I'll just use RN D3 and then close it off with a single quote then we can go and hit enter and let it do its thing and we'll eventually get a message saying received in act meaning the Remote device has acknowledged the command so if all went well the Remote device should have the new name and we have no need to travel back to the remote location to fix it that'll do it for this video setting up a device for remote Administration I hope you found it useful if you did please be sure to give this video a thumbs up and subscribe if you haven't already done so so you won't miss out on the upcoming video of the new solar device build that will be coming very soon thank you all and have a good one

Channel: The Comms Channel

Views: 17,880

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Id: SQdpCvOztMs

Length: 12min 19sec (739 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 17 2024