I suspect that if I can find the energy then I can now remotely monitor and remote control my three DLink modems using my ipad or some other machine using http.
I have managed to write a heap of tools for the ipad that can monitor the state of the lines by talking to my router (a Firebrick) over http. It has been very fiddly because I have had problems because the data returned has a variable or at least hard-to-parse format after it is output by the library routines I am stuck using - it changes format (in a sense) according various line or modem related error conditions. And basically screen-scraping the web ui has not been that easy partly because of the limitations of the tools I have used and partly because of the general fact that the web tends to be only fit for human consumption and is not usually designed for maximum machine-readable friendliness. Using the WorkFlow programming language engine for the iPad I can check the status of modems and dsl lines, find modem vs port vs line interconnection mistakes, send new config xml to the router, and remote reboot it.
I suppose I could do something similar by talking to the modems’ http admin interfaces, check error rates and force them to sync now if there are problems. G.DMT has done a lot of excellent work in talking to this model of modem, much of it using telnet, some of it using http, I forget.
If my raspberry pi were working then I could run it on that. But I would have a lot of choices to make about tools and libraries. One good thing then would be that a monitoring server process could more easily run continuously. Mind you, I could have something running continuously on my older, spare iPad, provided that it does not decide to go to sleep for some reason.
One problem would be that of gathering stats and spotting resynch events. Perhaps I just say that if an error count goes down, then there has just been a resync and I have lost some data in the interval between polls when I query a modem for stats, so I just difference values and ignore differences that are negative.
If I send the modem an http request, it just immediately generates a page prompting me to login with username and password. I tried sending http ‘basic authentication’ with the original request to see if I could sweet talk it that way, but no luck, assuming I got the format right (used the example of code that I have used successfully for this before in talking to a Firebrick by http) then perhaps it just doesn't support this.
What kind of stuff should I send it to login ? I've never done exactly this before.
[Moderator edited to merge two successive posts.]
