What’s been done
The first blog post that describes the idea and goals can be read here.
After getting a bit more familiar with the code base the first thing that had to be done was to set up the work environment. I chose to go the virtual machine route so an actual router did not need to be used, making the development easier. An instance of the nodewatcher is running on a virtual machine running Ubuntu Linux. It runs in a Docker development environment and is set up by using the provided Docker Compose configuration. To enable data collection from nodes the monitor system also needs to be running.
To test the the nodewatcher’s HMAC signing capabilities I set up a dummy test node, turned on HMAC signing and used a python script to push some data on to the nodewatcher.
The next step was to set up a development node. With a lot of help from my mentor Kostko I used firmware-core to create a LEDE virtual machine, compile nodewatcher-agent packages, transferred them to the LEDE machine, used SSH to connect to it, installed them and tested the basic nodewatcher-agent functions. The whole setup and development process was documented in detail in the nodewatcher-agent README. Then I set up the agent’s http.push module and pushed some data on to the nodewatcher instance.
A local network like one in the above image was set up for development. Due to my lack of experience with networking I encountered some issues like not being able to ssh into the LEDE VM and not being able to send packets from LEDE VM to Nodewatcher VM, but with patience from my mentor it all works and the lesson was surely learned.
What’s next
So the hardest part is done, right? I am now working on adding a HMAC signing like it’s already done in the python script. It needs to be developed for both pushing the data from a node to the nodewatcher and pulling the data from a node.
I am contributing using my github account.
Onwards! Good luck!