Travelmate support thread

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61

As I've said before, I really enjoy the Travelmate app while traveling (d'oh!). However, the addition of the captive portal detection and qr-code functionality make the app too bloated for my personal taste. They're both not options that I see a use case for while introducing new dependencies and gobbling up cpu cycles/memory. I hope this isn't the start of Travelmate going the way of Zawinski's Law :wink:

I'll stick to 1.0.2 for now, as I really think that version of Travelmate is doing what it should and does it exceptionally well!

62

Appreciate your feedback - thanks!
To be honest I'm not very happy with this additional qrencode frontend dependency, too. With the next frontend update I have removed this hardcoded dependency and placed the QR code stuff behind an (optional) button on the overview page ... this button is only visible if "/usr/bin/qrencode" is installed, e.g.:

button
button864×153 13 KB

The captive portal detection & "keep alive" function is just an option for you and can be disabled at any time. I'm using this on daily basis ...:wink:

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63

Maybe I'm not seeing the use here... :wink: If I connect Travelmate to a network that has a captive portal, my devices (phone, laptop) connected to the router immediately notify me of the captive portal. Also when a network requires you to log in again after (for example) 24h, it's more likely I notice this on my phone than in the Travelmate webinterface?

Anyways, as you said it's optional, and I'm happy the QR function will be so, too :slight_smile:

64

The latest frontend update with the optional QR code support is now in trunk - that's the final version for forthcoming 18.x OpenWrt release.

I stay frequently in a hotel with a captive portal which disconnects the user after 60 minutes of inactivity, therefore I need this cp/keep alive function ... :wink:

65

I revisit this thread with suggestion that it would be better to add a few lines on connecting to a hidden ssid in README.MD.
The following thing has to be done on my tplink 720nv3 (ar71xx) with Openwrt(LEDE) r6515: Option bssid of the hidden ssid must be specified in /etc/config/wireless.
Otherwise uplink will not be made.
While it's clearly written in codes of travelmate.sh, and luci frontend already has this field, still it would save new users of such usecase some time. Thanks for your hardwork.

66

@dibdot, two questions:

  1. With the following /etc/config/travelmate:

    config travelmate 'global'
    option trm_automatic '1'
    option trm_captive '1'
    option trm_iface 'trm_wwan'
    option trm_triggerdelay '2'
    option trm_debug '0'
    option trm_minquality '35'
    option trm_maxwait '30'
    option trm_timeout '60'
    option trm_rtfile '/tmp/trm_runtime.json'
    option trm_enabled '1'
    option trm_maxretry '0'

When I try to tick the "Enable verbose debug logging" in the WebUI I get the error message: "Some fields are invalid, cannot save values!".

  1. On the router with two ethernet ports, one LAN and one WAN -- how can I merge the wan interface and the trm_wwan interface so that if there's connection on at least one I would get internet?

Thanks!

67

Value "0" for trm_maxretry is not allowed, the doc says: :wink:

trm_maxretry => how many times should travelmate try to connect to an uplink (int/default: '3', valid range: 1-10)

The "0" value was only a quick & dirty workaround in a former release to workaround situations when you (slowly) leave the range of an uplink and your uplink marked with the "_err" flag. Now travelmate checks continuously the signal quality for conditional uplink (dis-) connections - therefore this workaround is no longer needed.

Currently I can't test that but I would leave both interfaces as they are, only configured with a different routing metric.

1 Like
68

Good point - I'll made the "Ignore BSSID" flag conditional with this PR.

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69

So the uplink may have crashed and rebooted or I have re-flashed it while another router was connected to it with travelmate and it did rename STA ssid to ssid-err -- how can I avoid that now that 0 is no longer a valid value for trm_maxretry? I really want to keep all my STA configs unmolested, however badly they behave and I want travelmate to keep retrying connections forever. Which settings do I need to modify?

70

But that would render your AP in an unusable state. To defer the "_err" out mechanism raise "trm_maxretry" (max. 10) and/or "trm_timeout" (max. 300).

71

Dirk, thank you for your prompt reply. I must not understand what could have been the reason for renaming the SSID and implications of not having it renamed -- can you please elaborate on that?

72

Travelmate iterates through all configured STAs in your wireless config ... as long as the SSID/BSSID of a broken uplink is in your wireless config, travelmate will try to connect to it and you'll receive every 60 seconds a small AP outage. Maybe it's not the best approach to fiddle directly in the wireless config file to save the state of those broken uplinks, but it works ... :wink:

Of course I could also use the travelmate json status file for that ... I'll take a look.

73

Why can it mark uplink as broken?

75

if you can help me, i try build on chaos calmer openwrt luci-app-travelmate and success, but the problem is i did not find uplink interfensi and add interfensi, please helpScreenshot%20from%202018-05-20%2000-08-16

76

Chaos Calmer is not supported. You can try to manually setup the required uplink interface, just follow the instructions in the online documentation.

77

so I've got this working and it works great with networks I manage but im at a hotel and for somereason it won't work; continues to rename ssid to _error obviously because it has issue maintaining a connection. If, however, I use my S8+ as an intermediary tomake the connection to the hotell ssid and wifi share it to the dir-505 it works fine, so I wonder why this workaround works? Any takers? Woild be great to identify what travelmate appears to be missing while im here to test.

78

Did you try to connect manually with your router to that hotel wlan? Disable travelmate and try it via Wireless => Scan => Join network.

79

Thanks mate, figured it out! Issue was the subnet and ip syntax I had elected to use for the travel router, didn't mesh well with the hotels. I just applied the same set the S8+ had used and all worked well:)

Awesome program!

80

So I have an RE450 unit that has 1 ethernet connection on it. I would like to use this ethernet connection as a possible uplink mechanism.

What is the recommended way to use eth0 as an alternate uplink??

Ideally, id love a model where I could map a button press as a toggle between the ethernet being a lan port and it being a wan port. But that is for another day...

--
John C

81

Travelmate doesn't care normal ethX interfaces at all - just configure/prioritize your relevant interfaces with a different routing metric.