squirt - Remotely manage your Amiga from modern systems

[alpine9000]

Hi,

Just thought I would let people know about this new little project I have recently started. It's very much work in progress, so I haven't made any releases yet.

squirt is a small network server (Amiga executable is less than 5kb) and some command line tools for Windows/Linux/Mac that let's you remotely manage your Amiga computers via TCP/IP.

I wrote this because none of the existing tools that do the same thing really worked exactly how I wanted them to.

So far you can:

• Send (squirt) files
• Recieve (suck) files
• Run non interactive commands
• List directories
• Perform incremental backups
• Run a remote cli
  • Filename completion on remote Amiga files
  • Line editing and command history (similar to bash etc)
  • Run (non interactive) commands remotely on your Amiga
  • Run commands locally on your modern system
  • Local commands can easily access both Amiga and local files (even mixed in the same command)

Image of running an incremental backup:



Here is a little demo of the remote cli showing editing and running "diff" on a mix of remote Amiga files as local files.

[ Show youtube player ]


You can see more info at the squirt github project page

[dalek]

wow - that looks so cool! Looking forward to having a play with it

[lesta_smsc]

Looks like a promising start. I'm sure a GUI would come a long with this by others once released to give frontend to command line interface (as has been done for Greaseweazle).

Keep up the good work!

[gurth]

nice.

[vulture]

that's VERY nice!

[Hewitson]

This is an interesting piece of software. With the remote CLI, is that run in the background on the Amiga or is it visible and you can watch what the remote user is doing?

Originally Posted by lesta_smsc

Looks like a promising start. I'm sure a GUI would come a long with this by others once released to give frontend to command line interface (as has been done for Greaseweazle).

What additional functionality would a GUI offer for this particular application?

[gurth]

Originally Posted by Hewitson

What additional functionality would a GUI offer for this particular application?

Drag and drop.
File explorer.

[alpine9000]

Originally Posted by Hewitson

This is an interesting piece of software. With the remote CLI, is that run in the background on the Amiga or is it visible and you can watch what the remote user is doing?

The “remote cli” isn’t an ongoing process on the Amiga, the little server runs each command in the background as a new process. But it is run in the background so you can’t see what the remote user is doing.

[malko]

worth it !

[coldacid]

I can't wait until this is available! It'll be very helpful for working with my WinUAE configs.

[quantum8]

Nice one! This'll help with backing up my machine nicely.

[nogginthenog]

Looks promising! I never found Amiga network filesystems all that reliable, especially for big files (like a backup). Also, I could never get Putty working 100% with a remote shell.

[alpine9000]

Originally Posted by nogginthenog

Looks promising! I never found Amiga network filesystems all that reliable, especially for big files (like a backup). Also, I could never get Putty working 100% with a remote shell.

Yeah I also tried lots of things before I decided to write this. Most existing solutions do _almost_ what I need.

Stuff I tried is either a bit too slow to initiate connections, uses quite a lot of ram, or won't nicely intergrate into my build system or other issues.

I mainly use this from Makefiles to transfer and set up files then automatically test games I am writing. Once the transfer stuff was done I figured it would be easy to add backup/restore. That way I can incrementally back my Amigas up to a git repo or something.

I might also do a serial version of this some time.

[aeberbach]

Very cool, well done - and I’m really liking your GitHub too.

[E-Penguin]

Can you expose AREXX ports over the network?

[jotd]

at first glance I read "remotely damage your amiga from modern systems"

That really looks good. I use sync tools to synchronize my CF with my windows hard drive, but I find that the sync always copies too much, which defeats the purpose, takes forever and damages the CF card.

Running that sync from WinUAE with the CF card in would make it much simpler.

[alpine9000]

Originally Posted by E-Penguin

Can you expose AREXX ports over the network?

I guess you could proxy arexx ports, but what would talk to them?

[abbub]

Looks cool!

[alpine9000]

I have done a little bit more work on this, and it's probably at a stage where I could do a release if anyone is interested in trying it.

Some of the stuff I have done is:

• Added support for optionally running from inetd. This allows multiple concurrent invocations (See detailes here)
• Tested backup by backing up all of my Amigas
  
• Restored a backup to a new CF card after a fresh WB install
• Added optional CRC32 checksums to the backups and restores
• Created a couple of little Amiga command line utilities that allow you to send "Ctrl-C" to background processes
  

You can see from the screenshot above there are two commands I created:

• sps - show a list of CLI processes
• skill - Send a Ctrl-C signal to the specified CLI process

I added these so I can run SongPlayer in the background and get it to quit when required.

I have tested the client apps on:

• OSX
• Ubuntu x86
• Raspberry PI
• Windows

So if anyone is interested in playing with this I can make a release with binaries , so let me know which OS you would be running the client apps on.

Note: For Windows at the moment it really works best using the new Windows Terminal with UTF-8 support enabled. This is because I currently use iconv to convert Latin1 characters on the Amiga side to UTF-8 as well as using UTF-8 emjois as status icons.

[abbub]

Definitely interested in trying it. I'm running macOS, but also have linux and raspbian.