MQTT-AGENT

The program plugin-architecture was created to retrieve information from computers via mqtt

The program has been tested on ubuntu 20.04 and the lastest Linux Mint as of 03/17/2021 Windows version github.com/JesseDavids/mqtta-win10

The program comes with free to use plugins

• report_plugin (reports your system information back to you)
• hostname_plugin (allows you to change your hostname)
• ping_plugin (lets you ping a specific IP address)
• traceroute_plugin (Enjoy traceroute to a website or IP address, in order to use this plugin you need to install traceroute on your computer sudo apt install traceroute.
• reboot_plugin (Remotely reboot your system)
• shutdown_plugin (Or shut it down completely)
• list_plugin (this plugin lists all available computers connected to the broker, when used, all computers return their hostname and ip address) - workstation/list/

With this information, coupled with good management software such as mqtt explorer the possibilities are endless

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INSTRUCTIONS

• Ensure the mqtt broker, and pip3 is installed before proceeding with these tasks
  • Follow these links on how to do that:
    • and use this command to install the client broker sudo apt install mosquitto
    • https://linuxize.com/post/how-to-install-pip-on-ubuntu-18.04/
    • NOTE: Pip comes with the installation of python3.X

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• Create a folder in your Documents folder (or wherever) and pull the repo into that folder then cd into it
• Install any requirements from the requirements.txt file pip3 install -r requirements.txt(My current version of pip is 20.0.2)
• Open the config file setup.config and edit the broker IP address and file path to save the logs
• You can run it in two ways, firstly, you can type in the terminal ./main.py and run it like that, or
• You could run it as a service, to do this i made a .service file with basic configurations called mqtta.service.
• Open the service file and edit it to your environment with sudo nano mqtta.service, note: User= should be your current user. i.e User=username
• Save the service file in the /etc/systemd/system/ directory
• Then run this command systemctl start mqtta.service
• Refresh daemon with systemctl daemon-reload
• If you would like the service to start on boot run this command after the above command, systemctl enable mqtta.service
• Restart the service with, systemctl restart mqtta.service then check the status, systemctl status mqtta.service

After everything is set and configured, let's test it

• open a terminal and type in mosquitto_sub -h 127.0.0.1 -t "#"

  • (-h) this indicates which host we are connecting to
  • (-t) this is the topic we are subscribing to, and # = hash means everything, so we will receive any message that comes through

• 3 parameters exist, (n = notice, r = read, w = write)

• open another terminal and type mosquitto_pub -h 127.0.0.1 -t "workstation/your-hostname/parameter/report/ -m ""

  • expected output:

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  • If you want this to work the IP needs to be your own, or another IP on the same network connected to the mqtt broker

  • (-m) this indicates the message you want to send to that particular topic, some plugins do not need a message as the report_plugin

• Here is another example mosquitto_pub -h 127.0.0.1 -t "workstation/hostname-or-ip/r/ping/ -m "1.1.1.1 10 0.2"

  • Note the -m (message). IP {space} Count {space} Interval
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