Help with Fing

Posted on
Sat Oct 12, 2013 7:06 pm
farberm offline
Posts: 393
Joined: Feb 24, 2008

Help with Fing

I previously used Smartphone Radar with SNMP and everything was working fine. I am trying to convert to Fing as I update my access points to the new Airport Extremes.

I have followed the instructions and install Fing from overlook.com
I have downloaded fingscaninstall and fingscan and placed them on my desktop of the computer running Indigo.
I have Smartphone Radar 1.1.4 plug-in installed

I redefined devices in Smartphone Radar plugin using the fing option. I used the MAC address using capital letters and numbers in the format XX:XX:XX:XX:XX;XX

Despite this the devices are not detected as home or away anymore. WhenI start they are listed as home. Then then switch to away after the default of 15 minutes and then never register as home despite me turning the wifi on and off and keeping the phone plugged in.

Fing path (unix): /Users/"username"/Documents/fing/finglog

ipdevupdate shows me that the log file is being monitored

Any help would be appreciated. I could go thru the process of defining more variable as outlined in the fing help document but that seems more cumbersome than using Smartphone Radar.

Do I need to have the file extension listed in the path etc...

Posted on
Sat Oct 12, 2013 9:18 pm
colday offline
Posts: 7
Joined: Oct 03, 2013

Re: Help with Fing

I've been around and around this in the last few days. I got nowhere using Smartphone Radar.

Then I tried to use fingscan & that worked after a LOT of trial and error. Please note that I am very new at this and not a programmer.

Take a look at the Variable List (⌘9).
Find your phone in the ipDevicexx list (the Smartphone Radar variables did not work for me).

Create a new variable i.e. "my phone is home" and enter nothing in the value

Now create a trigger:
Type: "Variable Changed"
Variable: "ipDevicexx" (replace "xx" with the one you want to monitor)
Select "changes"

Condition:
If conditions match rules:
If variable -> ipDevicexx -> contains -> value "down" (or up)

Actions:
Type: Modify Variable
Variable: "my phone is home"
Set to true (or false)

I created two triggers, one setting the value of "my phone is home" to "true" and the other setting it to "false".

Now on your control page add new
Display "variable value" for "my phone is home"
As image, PlainButton_small.png
Caption it

Obviously this is probably not the best way but it got it working for me. Now I (and you) can tweak it.

Posted on
Sun Oct 13, 2013 3:25 am
farberm offline
Posts: 393
Joined: Feb 24, 2008

Re: Help with Fing

Seems to be working using the following path to fingdata NOT finglog

Fing path (unix): /Users/"username"/Documents/fing/fingdata

Posted on
Sun Oct 13, 2013 8:08 am
kw123 offline
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Posts: 8335
Joined: May 12, 2013
Location: Dallas, TX

Re: Help with Fing

yes, that is a way to use the variables correctly.
One comment, I would use ";down" and ";up" to identify the states. The variables contains some plain text like vendor, device name etc. They could contain the string "up" eg a vendor name "upscale" would always create an UP condition

as for the FING data / log:

fingdata contains a list of all known ip devices and it is generated by FING.bin. It is updated once a minute by FING.bin
finglog contains events that happens in-between ie a new device shows up or a "down" device reconnects. FING.bin adds one line to this file for every event.
FINGSCAN.bin reads both of these files and updates / creates the variables in Indigo.

You should not need to worry about these files.


Karl

FING.bin is the executable file of the fing system (downloaded from overlooksoft.com)
FINGSCAN.bin is the executable that reads fingdata and finglog and adds info to the Indigo variables.

Posted on
Sun Oct 13, 2013 8:45 am
farberm offline
Posts: 393
Joined: Feb 24, 2008

Re: Help with Fing

When I tried finglog it did not work with smartphone radar. I cannot choose ;up
Or ; down as that is being set by smartphone radar which I believe is looking for the MAC address along with ;up or ;down

Did you ever get smartphone radar plugin to work with finglog?

Posted on
Sun Oct 13, 2013 11:05 am
kw123 offline
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Posts: 8335
Joined: May 12, 2013
Location: Dallas, TX

Re: Help with Fing

here is the misunderstanding:

[edit] smartphoneradar and fingscan are 2 unrelated programs. They happen to use both FING and likely a different format etc [end edit]

fingdata and finglog are named (including the directory where they are located) and setup by FINGSCANINSTALL to be used by FINGSCAN.
These 2 files have a different purpose and have a different format.

Smartphoneradar is likely only using the data from the file LIKE fingdata. I don't know the format it needs.
FING allows > 3 different formats for these files: table, csv, html,...
When starting FING (in FINGSCAN) it selects CSV ( items separated by ";" ) format for both files.

Karl

Posted on
Mon Oct 14, 2013 12:51 am
bip.philippe offline
Posts: 58
Joined: Feb 20, 2013
Location: France

Re: Help with Fing

Hi,

I have worked on patching smartphone radar with fing as a new way of getting smartphone presence. It is implemented as a third communication choice.
I did not work on the launching fing aspect and decided to rely on a fing launched by another way (which is the case on my mac mini, in fact).

This allowed me to solve the issue cause by the latest airport extreme and to keep the built-in smartradar mechanisms.

It is running for three weeks at home. Yon can download it from here : http://bipphilippe.files.wordpress.com/ ... eradar.zip.

Bernard

Posted on
Tue Oct 15, 2013 5:51 pm
midd offline
Posts: 372
Joined: Apr 18, 2010

Re: Help with Fing

I have Fing installed and now installed the patched Smartphone radar. Do I need to do anything with the previously installed Fing? Both of my smartphones are still saying home when one of them was away. Should I delete everything and start from scratch with the patched plugin?

Indigo 7, Monterey (12.1) on a 2009 Mac Pro..

Posted on
Thu Oct 17, 2013 1:07 pm
bip.philippe offline
Posts: 58
Joined: Feb 20, 2013
Location: France

Re: Help with Fing

Hi,

You do not need to re-declare devices if they are declare with their MAC address (and not the IP one).

The first thing to check are :
  • The devices are to be declared with their mac address.
  • Fing must be running. you can start it from terminal this way : (myname being your user name directory)
    Code: Select all
    cd /Users/myname
    sudo nice fing -o table,csv,fing.log --silent &
  • The configuration of the plug-in must be :
    Code: Select all
    Select your router : Fing log
    File path (unix) : /Users/myname

I hope this help.
Do not hesitate to let me know the result.
If this does not work, we will use log to further investigate.

Posted on
Thu Oct 17, 2013 3:21 pm
farberm offline
Posts: 393
Joined: Feb 24, 2008

Re: Help with Fing

I m tryng to determine the cause of lost connections. It is either that the new iphone 5s connects to the network less often therefore there are several error in away and home. I have increase the default to 30 minutes to see if that helps. I have set the phone to fetch mail every 15 minutes so I am unsure as to why there appears to be several dropouts.

Still investigating.

Posted on
Fri Oct 18, 2013 2:14 am
bip.philippe offline
Posts: 58
Joined: Feb 20, 2013
Location: France

Re: Help with Fing

Hi,

I faced this issue with my iPhone 5s under iOS 7. It sounds that the iPhone wifi goes to sleep to optimize battery consumption.
An iPhone 4 under iOS 6 does not behave the same.

I have setup the same solution as you a few days ago and it sounds to work.

Let me know,

Posted on
Sun Oct 27, 2013 1:24 pm
wileyone offline
Posts: 14
Joined: Sep 04, 2013

Re: Help with Fing

Just weighing in on a couple of things.

I am using kw123s fingscan to determine smartphone (iPhone) presence. It was working fine and then my router hiccuped and did some crazy things with IP addresses. Long story short is that to get things going again reliably I went ahead and assigned static addresses to our iPhones, IP Cameras, etc. Everything appears to be stable at this point. So I guess the point of this is that some odd things were happening due to my router and it appears to have been fixed by making the addresses static.

With iOS 7 it seems that the phones are experiencing more offline time than they were previously. I've had to extend my delay time to ~20 minutes before I take any action.

FYI...

Posted on
Sun Oct 27, 2013 5:20 pm
kw123 offline
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Posts: 8335
Joined: May 12, 2013
Location: Dallas, TX

Re: Help with Fing

the IP number of the devices is not tracked, its just text for fingscan
ONLY the MAC number is used to track and sync info. IP number is the same kind of info as e.g. vendor info. its just text written to the ipDevcicexx variables.

As the MAC numbers don't change, I don't see the reason that anything should happen, let me know what went wrong..

Karl

Posted on
Mon Oct 28, 2013 6:00 am
wileyone offline
Posts: 14
Joined: Sep 04, 2013

Re: Help with Fing

Thanks Karl - I will try to give you my perspective on what was happening. Some of it I have a good feel for, and some I don't, so here goes...

kw123 wrote:
the IP number of the devices is not tracked, its just text for fingscan

Yes, I understand that the variable values in the ipDeviceXX variables is just a text value. However, what was happening (this is the part I don't understand fully) was that one of our iPhones would jump onto the network with a given ip address (it was .1.13) and show in the Indigo variables as being "up", and then when it would check out (go "down"), the ipDevice variable would show as having a different ip address (it would be .1.31 - I think the "13" and "31" were just a coincidence). I believe the router was flip-flopping the ip address of that device.

The result this had was that in Indigo I would trigger off of a change in the variable ipDevice35 (the name of the variable in this instance) and it was the ip address that was changing, not actually the state of the device. So, if the device was up the whole time, but the router was changing the ip address, then I would get false indications of a change in the device. That's why I went to static addresses for these devices, so I wouldn't get false triggers.

The other thing I did was I thought I would try to reassign the device to a new ipDeviceXX variable. So, I deleted ipDevice35, hoping it would just reassign it to the next open variable slot. This had a cascading effect on a number of things - not to mention all the triggers and action groups I had set up, so I went back to using ipDevice35.

Bottom line is that when I locked down the ip addresses it solved the problem(s) for me. The added benefit now is that I am not near as fearful as I was previously about router reboots :)

Posted on
Mon Oct 28, 2013 7:22 am
kw123 offline
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Posts: 8335
Joined: May 12, 2013
Location: Dallas, TX

Re: Help with Fing

yes, deleting a devicexx variable (if not the last one) is not covered by the script. that would crash it. still on my todo list

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