Re: Forward LIRC from one machine to another via UDP over the network?

[Paul F. <pg...@fo...>]

patrick wrote:
 >    I cobbled together this command on the RPi, hoping it would send the IR
 >    signals to the MythTV computer in the same way the HDHR did but it doesn't
 >    seem to be working.  I'm running irw on the 192.168.1.2 computer but it's
 >    not receiving any signals.
 > 
 >    /usr/bin/mode2 -d /dev/lirc0 | irtext2udp | socat -
 >    udp-datagram:[1]192.168.1.2:5000,broadcast
 > 
 >    I'm hoping someone else has done this or has experience with it and could
 >    offer me some assistance please.

Unless something has changed recently (and I doubt it), irtext2udp
is broken, because it matches the documentation of the UDP protocol, which
is also broken.  I submitted patches for these issues in March 2022:
    https://sourceforge.net/p/lirc/tickets/370/
I also sent mail to the (this) list about it at the same time -- I'm sure
it's in the archives.  So that's probably at least part of your problem.

For various reasons (mostly historical, but also having to do with my
network topology), I don't do lircd processing on the raspberry pi boxes
that are scattered around the house, each with an IR receiver.  Instead,
I forward the IR to a central server, where there's an instance of
lircd running for every client.  Since UDP can't make it through
my firewall, I send it over tcp, through an ssh tunnel, and convert
back to UDP at the destination.

For all of those reasons, I don't use irtext2udp.  I use my own script
(attached), which takes mode2 format and converts it to the UDP
format, and sends it to a tcp port.  You'll see that it sends to a port
on "localhost" -- that's because it's actually being forwarded across
an ssh tunnel.

On the receiving end, I have a listener that gets data from the other end
of the ssh tunnel.  The meat of it is this line:
   socat -u tcp4-listen:88${octet},reuseaddr,fork UDP:localhost:87${destoctet}
The 88xx address is what the ssh server delivers to, and the 87xx
address is the appropriate lircd daemon.

Hope some part of this helps.

paul
=----------------------
paul fox, pg...@fo... (arlington, ma, where it's 59.2 degrees)