[Freedombox-discuss] How can I get plinth listening on a public address?

[Petter Reinholdtsen]

[Nick Daly]
> Unless folks have other requests, I was just going to merge the
> source/home/fbx/plinth-startup.sh file into a new
> source/etc/apache/sites-available/plinth soon.

I would suggest you have a look at my deb based
/usr/lib/freedombox/setup approach instead, as it is able to handle
any Debian based installation, not just the ones we create images for.
It work on both Raspberry Pi with Raspian and my test laptop. :)

Using the setup in that script, I got plinth running and answering
requests on the public IP address of my test box.  I install a minimal
debian wheezy machine, install freedombox-setup, run
/usr/lib/freedombox/setup and reboot - and voila. :)

My code is in <URL: https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/freedom-maker >,
run (cd pkgs/freedombox-setup; debuild) to build the freedombox-setup deb
you need.

But there is something wrong with plinth/exmachina as checked out from
git.  When I try to start it, I get this error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/fbx/plinth/plinth.py", line 172, in <module>
    main()
  File "/home/fbx/plinth/plinth.py", line 165, in main
    setup()
  File "/home/fbx/plinth/plinth.py", line 118, in setup
    secret_key=cfg.exmachina_secret_key or None)
  File "/home/fbx/plinth/vendor/exmachina/exmachina.py", line 309, in __init__
    if self.conn.call.need_to_auth():
  File "/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.7/bjsonrpc/proxies.py", line 43, in function
    return self._conn.proxy(self.sync_type, name, args, kwargs)
  File "/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.7/bjsonrpc/connection.py", line 611, in proxy
    return req.value
  File "/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.7/bjsonrpc/request.py", line 115, in value
    raise ServerError(self.response['error'])
bjsonrpc.exceptions.ServerError: Unknown method 'need_to_auth'

My fix is to replace the plinth/vendor/exmachina source with the one
checked out in ~fbx/, like this:

  /home/fbx/plinth/vendor/
  mv exmachina  exmachina.orig
  ln -s ../../exmachina .
  touch exmachina/__init__.py

Anyone else seing it?  It seem to me like the exmachina version
checked out by 'make' in the plinth directory is the wrong one, but I
did not really investigate.

But the plinth interface I get access to via http://myfreedombox:8001/
do not seem to do much.  It ask for the host name and key, but do not
write anything in /etc/ when I set it.

-- 
Happy hacking
Petter Reinholdtsen