TARPN-HOME Web Application

The TARPN installation includes a web-app server.
This is a program written for TARPN by Fin, NC4FG.
If a web browser is used with the IP address of the Raspberry PI and port number 8085, the user will be presented with a user interface for accessing the packet network and the CROWD converse node.
For example, my Raspberry PI is assigned IP address 192.168.0.15. If I launch Safari and type the address http://192.168.0.15:8085 I will be shown this display:

As of version 1.5, the Node tab is presented first with no history displayed. The Crowd tab, on the other hand, shows the last 2000 characters of information received by the TARPN-HOME web-app running on the node. You can see recent conversation immediately upon rejoining your CROWD session. If you walk away from your shack and your computer, then upon arriving in the TV room and reach for your tablet, you can start the tablet's web browser and reconnect to TARPN-HOME from there, not only seeing the conversation as you left it but actually getting newer lines of text which have arrived. This is very convenient. The Node tab is also shared across all connected browsers, but the history is not automatically loaded when you join.

What you need to know

The program is very easy to use. To start TARPN-HOME you need to go to the Linux prompt on the Raspberry PI and use tarpn home start. After about a minute you can access the web page from your browser as discussed above.

Updating to latest TARPN-HOME

To update the program and get the latest version, again from the linux prompt type tarpn home update. That should take about two minutes. If you are starting from a version from July 2017 or older, you'll need to stop your node using tarpn service stop and then run tarpn updateapps and finally start the node again with tarpn service start, This could take an hour to complete depending on how long it has been since your last updateapps. This update won't work at all if your node software is older than October 2015.

Multiple Browsers

You can have many browsers running at the same time. Each will see the same connections. You can move from one computer to the other, or leave one running all the time, while you use a more convenient tablet or laptop to operate with. TARPN-HOME sends a beep-beep signal any time text arrives, to any browser which is either hidden, unfocussed, or idle for more than 5 minutes. It is very handy.

Node Tab

When you first open a browser window, it comes up in the Node tab which lets you connect to your node by clicking on the Reconnect button. Now you can give commands to your node including connecting to another node. Use this interface to explore, diagnose, or customise the nodes. You can also use this interface to connect to network servers, like a BBS or HOST port or something that I don't know about as I type this.

Commands that you can give a node are described (incompletely and badly) in
G8BPQ Node Commands "User" and in
G8BPQ Node Commands "Password"

Crowd Tab

This tab is used to semi-automatically connect you to the local network's round-table chat service, usually called CROWD. Click on JOIN and wait for the service to talk back to you. In practice, everything you type goes out to all of the stations who are connected. At some point I'll write a page on the CROWD node. If I already have, somebody should tell me to link to it here! In the mean time, if you type /? you will be sent a page of commands useful on CROWD.

Commands can be in upper or lower case.
/U - Show Users.
/N - Enter your Name.
/Q - Enter your QTH.
/T - Show Topics.
/T Name - Join Topic or Create new Topic. Topic Names are not case sensitive
/P - Show Ports and Links.
/A - Toggle Alert on user join - Enabled.
/C - Toggle Colour Mode on or off (required for color on the Crowd tab).
/Codepage CPnnnn - Set Codepage to use if UTF-9 is disabled.
/E - Toggle Echo - Enabled. (required to see your own traffic on the Crowd tab).
/Keepalive - Toggle sending Keepalive messages every 10 minutes - Enabled.
/ShowNames - Toggle displaying name as well as call on each message - Enabled.
/Auto - Toggle Automatic character set selection - Disabled.
/UTF-8 - Character set Selection - UTF-8.
/Time - Toggle displaying timestamp on each message - Enabled.
/S CALL Text - Send Text to that station only.
/F - Force all links to be made.
/K - Show Known nodes.
/B - Leave Chat and return to node.
/QUIT - Leave Chat and disconnect from node.

The commands in red are ones you should probably try out. /T command is used for having separate chat rooms for specific topics. That might be useful if we had dozens of users at a time. Other commands, /P /F /K are related to having CROWD nodes in disparate locations which connect to each other, to share users and content.

The TARPN-HOME web app tries to keep you connected to CROWD. If you don't type anything for 20 minutes, the TARPN-HOME app will send a private /s message through CROWD on your behalf. The message is addressed back to your callsign and has the text contents "keepalive !!". CROWD will relay that message back to your station but then TARPN-HOME will eat it. The point of this is that the entire path from TARPN-HOME to CROWD and back is exercised and nothing times out, leaving you connected to CROWD indefinitely.
You can see the keepalive go by on the BPQterm monitor if you are watching.

Close App Server

This button will tell the web-app running on the Raspberry PI to quit. The Linux service controlled by the TARPN scripts will immediately start the web-app again, unless, using the linux command prompt, you command the TARPN-HOME web app to stop.

G8BPQ APIs

V1.0 through V1.5 of the TARPN-HOME application use the TNC2 emulation API exposed by G8BPQ. This API presents a cmd: prompt to the application and enables the application (or a user) to take the TNC (emulation) into converse mode, or command mode. The TARPN-HOME programs prevents you from moving from converse to command, but if a break in your connection occurs, the TARPN-HOME app may show you the cmd: prompt. If you get a cmd: prompt, you can tell TARPN-HOME to put you back into network connection by hitting the Join button. If that seems to fail, try the Reconnect button. Next try refreshing your browser window. If that still doesn't work, try the Close App Server button.

For more info, see the tarpn host & minicom, check into the CROWD node and ask, or send mail to the TARPN yahoo group.

For more access to the TNC2 emulation API, go to a linux command prompt (terminal or SSH/PUTTY?) and type
tarpn host