5/7/2023 0 Comments Neorouter free limitations![]() You may be able to install Pagekite from your repository, but it might be an older version. To be sure I actually redirected the script from curl into a temporary file, examined it, and then ran it. ![]() Honestly, you don’t know these guys so I wouldn’t suggest just piping something off the Internet into my root shell. If you go to the Pagekite web site, they have a really simple “flight plan” to get you started: curl -s | sudo bash For right now, though, assume you are happy to use their server. I would go on to set the whole thing up on my own servers (I’ll talk about that next time). The software is all open source and there is a reasonable amount of free use on their servers. What I wound up using was a service called Pagekite. You also need a NeoRouter server on the public Internet with an open port. ![]() You need to run some kind of server like a Web server. Honestly, that sounds great, but I found it a little difficult to set up. The traffic will securely traverse the public Internet as though the two computers were directly connected with no firewalls or anything else between them. It doesn’t matter if the Pi is halfway around the world. If my desktop computer has a NeoRouter IP of 10.0.0.2 and my Pi has 10.0.0.9 then I can simply ssh over to that IP address. NeoRouter has software for many platforms that can create a virtual private network (VPN) that appears to be a new network interface where all the participants are local. There are a few options for cases like this. Sometimes you just need to get to the box in question. Until you need to ssh into the box to make some updates. For the hypothetical picture frame, maybe it checks a web server on the public Internet periodically for new content. Granted, you can handle that as a system design problem. Or maybe you have built a smart picture frame to put in a hospital or nursing home and you want access over the institution’s WiFi. For example, perhaps you will use your box at different traffic intersections over a 3G modem. But suppose you don’t know for sure where your system will deploy. That’s fine if you are at home and you control all of your network access and hardware. If you have a firewall in hardware and/or software (and it is a good bet that you do), you’ll also have to open the firewall port and tell the NAT router that you want to service traffic on the given port. That well-known server answers DNS requests (the thing that converts into a real IP address). You usually use some kind of dynamic DNS service that lets the Pi (or any computer) tell a well-known server its current IP address (see figure below). What do you do if you want to put a Raspberry Pi, for example, on a network and expose it? If you control the whole network, it isn’t that hard. What’s worse is, you share that public address with others, so your IP address is subject to change on a whim. But also, most inexpensive options expose one IP address to the world and then do Network Address Translation (NAT) to distribute service to local devices like PCs, phones, and tablets. You can’t do much about that except throw more money at your network provider. Most low-cost network options are asymmetrical. But turning your computer into a server is a little different. But that network is decidedly slanted at letting you get to the outside world. All of these options are cheaper than ever before. If you are out in the sticks, you can consider satellite. Today boards like the Raspberry Pi, the Beagle Bone, and their many imitators make it easy to get a small functioning computer on the network - wired or wireless. But your toaster or washing machine probably didn’t have a cable next to it in those days. The TINI boards I used (later named MxTNI) had an Ethernet port. Back in 2003, it wasn’t always easy to get a board on the Internet. ![]() It also means you get a lot of data you have to find a reason to use. That means you can connect things you never would have before. The big news - if you can call it that - is that the network is virtually everywhere. But my point is, the Internet of Things isn’t a child of this decade. Back in 2003, I wrote a book called Embedded Internet Design - save your money, it is way out of date now and the hardware it describes is all obsolete. If you are a long-time Hackaday reader, I’d imagine you are like me and thinking: “so what?” We’ve been building network-connected embedded systems for years. Everyone’s talking about the Internet of Things (IoT) these days.
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