HTTP Friends

[vegiemane]

Hi. Love owntracks!

Used to use MQTT but switched to HTTP for security reasons (have never used MQTT in my life but am very familiar with NGINX and basic auth/fail2ban).

Have been trying to setup friends with HTTP mode. For the most part on the android app it seems to work great, but the problem is with my users who are on iPhones. I have done the following commands to setup:

docker exec -it ot-recorder sh

ocat -S /store --load=friends <<EOF
user-android ["user2/iphone", "user/android"]
user2-iphone ["user/android", "user2/iphone"]
EOF
Note: these are just the syntax I used, not my actual users with their names

This seems to add friends to my android device, but not to my other users iPhone device.

I have also noticed that the dump command seems to return nothing in the friends, despite doing the load command many times (to no success).

docker exec -it ot-recorder sh

ocat -S /store --dump=friends
*no output*

Any help would be greatly appreciated. And love owntracks!

Edit:
Just a little update.

The iOS device suddenly had the friends working on it. Must have reset after submitting/posting a location.
But the issue still remains with the ocat command.
I also don't seem to have any sort of way to edit the friends database once it has been made, for example: removing a friend from a users device.

/config $ ocat -S /store --load=friends < friends.txt
/config $ ocat -S /store --dump=friends
/config $ ocat -S /store --dump=friends > test
/config $ cat test

Here is what my friends.txt looks like:

/config $ cat friends.txt
myfriend-iphone ["me/android", "myfriend/iphone"]
me-android ["myfriend/iphone", "me/android"]

[jpmens]

Used to use MQTT but switched to HTTP for security reason

"for security reasons" is a new one for us. There's certainly no need for that: TLS and authentication are available for MQTT as well as for HTTP so I see no difference.

Your issue is basically a duplicate of #507 in which I come to the conclusion that using this with docker can't work. Unless you find a workaround.

[vegiemane]

Whoops. I probably phrased that wrong. MQTT is definitely secure, but is a piece of software I have never used before. Hence I opted with HTTP only and am not using MQTT. So I'm not 100% confident I could set up MQTT securely. You could set up fail2ban with MQTT as well, but I think that is out of the scope of my skillset :)

I have just read the duplicate thread, and it makes sense as to why it is not working in docker.
Thank you for your help, I seem to have it working without being able to "--dump=friends" so all is well I guess.

Thank you for your support and I hope you keep up the great work!

[jpmens]

The iOS device suddenly had the friends working on it.
I seem to have it working without being able to --dump=friends

I am doubting this. It might appear to be working, but if the Recorder has no notion of the Friends, then it won't pass on their positions when a device POSTs their position.

Place two "befriended" OwnTracks devices next to eachother, and alternating, click "publish now" on either device. Do you see the position of device1 directly show on device2 and vice-versa?

I'm thinking this might be an after effect of

Used to use MQTT

[vegiemane]

I cannot place the devices next to one another as the befriended device is currently cross state. But I can confirm that they are both working with screenshots on both my android device, and my befriended iOS device.
It just seems that the dump command returns nothing, but it is definetly there and working on both OS's.

Can also confirm this is not an after effect of using MQTT. When I switched, I also didn't migrate any of the data/store (since I didn't know how lol).

[vegiemane]

Have just tested with the devices next to each other. Confirmed friends is working when publishing locations on both devices