Dude for Linux

[dssmiktik]

@normis

remember GRE debate for a few years? That only made people more angry because we weren’t getting ‘real’ responses from support, but rather getting answers making us users feel like it’s our fault, or that we shouldn’t be using such a standard protocol in networking equipment.

GRE is natively supported in RouterOS, by the way.

What is a “real” response? At the time we didn’t know if we will support it or not.

I know GRE is in v5, I’m very happy about that

It’s like this: You guys make the product, RouterOS, Dude, SWOS right? And you guys are making design decisions about the product, and interacting with customers via email, and forum to find bugs, implement new features, etc right? So, it would be safe to assume you guys (all Mikrotik staff that post on the forum) have a pretty good knowledge of the product(s), it’s features, and its future plans, etc… Each person may have an expertise on a specific aspect of the each product, but in general the people from Mikrotik who post on the forum should have a very good knowledge of the products they post about.

it ROS not a port of linux? I’m not seeing why it would be that
difficult

Having said all this, it seems a bit strange that the question you responded to was ‘misunderstood’. It may have something to do the understanding the context of the posting, however with a title like “Dude for Linux”, it would be difficult to misinterpret.

A side note about GRE: A lot of people posted asking about implementing a GRE feature in RouterOS. This is a very common protocol and pretty much all router devices support it (that I’m aware of), yet whenever we asked about it, Mikrotik response was always something like: use eoip, use vpn, use xyz tunnel. It seemed like you guys just didn’t want to answer the questions, so as users, we didn’t know what was going on. We just wanted an answer.

Back on track: The main thing with linux and Dude is this: We all know RouterOS runs on top of linux right? We know that Dude runs on top of RouterOS right?

1. Question: Why doesn’t Dude run on regular linux distros (ex. Red Hat, Ubuntu, etc…)?
2. Questoin: What would it take to run Dude on an above distro?

There are some very talented people at Mikrotik. There are also very talented people who visit these forums. When we ask questions, not all of us posting are beginners, and so it’s those ‘beginner’ responses that lead to posters feeling like our questions are being ignored.

Anyway, I hope some of this made sense

[normis]

Dude doesn’t run on top of RouterOS. It’s exclusively a windows program. You are talking about the Dude agent NPK package. This is where the misunderstanding came from

[dssmiktik]

@normis

Dude doesn’t run on top of RouterOS. It’s exclusively a windows program. You are talking about the Dude agent NPK package. This is where the misunderstanding came from

Right, so that makes sense.

However, I think the general discussion was about running the Dude agent on linux, kind of like ‘server mode’. So right now, we have to run the Dude client under windows (or linux using wine), which I think is ok. It’s the always-running Dude agent that would be nice to run native on linux. It’s the Dude agent that people understand runs on top of RouterOS, and that people are asking for a native linux port of.

Basically, it’s the server part of Dude that I think is being discussed here.

Anyway, I’m sure we could fill many pages of discussion

[doush]

+1 to this.
Why use wine at all to run a diagonistics server (Dude) ?

It doesnt sound logical, is it ?

[tombee79]

Hi


I have dude installed on linux Ubuntu 10.04 64bit, i run it with WINE.
The problem i am having is that any time i do my local LAN scan 192.168.8.0/24 it doens’t detects and layout any devices on my lan.
I checked the option to lay out the found devices once founded.


I works perfect on windows XP thoug.


Any idea what can cause it?



The Problem solved i changed the discovery mode to reliable but i encountered another one, when i right click on the device icone in Dude Network panel and select tools-> ping the ping failed for all of the devices i do it. Even when i select to ping not itself but other device on the network it fails. BTW, i don’t have firewall on local devices.

It works perfect on my WinXP machine thou. Linux is harder but for Commercial/Profe. it is better to have Dude for Linux


MAKE DUDE FOR LINUX, I use Ubuntu, BTW, you have 2 request than.

Thx

Thanks

[stmx38]

As we know http://wiki.ubnt.com/AirControl can be installed on Windows and Linux.

May be Dude on Ros is runs under wine too ?

[Sob]

Nope, ROS Dude is native.

To tell the truth, between first noticing Dude package for ROS x86 and getting the idea “woohoo, I’ll rip it out of there!” wasn’t more than half a second for me. The excitement was quickly gone in about twenty minutes when I realized it won’t function without some MikroTik process also running in the system. And even if it worked, it would probably violate some licence.

But the point is, Dude for Linux does exist. Probably only as agent without GUI, but that’s what most people would be happy with. Now if they just released it, it would be so great.

[Duduhandelman]

Looking for dude agent on Linux?
I’m using Dude 4 beta 3 using openvz vm running under wine.
It does not run as a service but it’s start automatically.

Working very very well.
My main server and dozen agents running like that.
It’s very easy to deploy just backup and restore the openvz part

This openvz continer is 700MB. That’s the reason I’m not uploading the file.
I will be happy to provide it if someone is able to provide FTP or space for that.

FYI
Openvz is running well on proxmox ve.

[LarryG]

I too would like to see “The Dude” as a linux native application. Wine is limited and using a VM takes way to much resources. As a new company that is implimenting Mikrotik routers at all its location and being a linux only shop it would be very welcomed. I think the attitude of just use wine sucks. not very friendly to the community. Maybe if it was open sourced you would see a lot more Linux users and from reading through the forum it sounds like “the dude” is pretty much dying out from lack of support from its windows counter part.

Just expressing my concerns. Thanks for listening.

[tombee79]

+1 The Dude for linux


thx

[wk5h]

I agree, a native dude client for linux would be nice… But, I haven’t found a need yet for what I use the dude for, to need a linux server install.

Maybe I just didn’t see it listed before, but, here was my solution, since I refuse to run anything “server” on a windows machine.

I have a machine that’s a dedicated vmware esxi 5 server. Nothing fancy, but beefy enough. I created a simple virtual machine, installed the x86 ROS on that vm, and registered for a level 1 license. I threw the dude npk file on that ROS machine, and I have a perfectly working, non-windows dude server that runs just fine along side some other virtual machines I have running. Probably most of us have an older machine lying around not doing anything, and I imagine that you could do the same level 1 license on that machine, and it run fine as well. I don’t use it for anything else but for the dude.

Now, for the dude client, I still run it in wine both on my macbook pro and on my linux machine, but, I don’t have to run it as root. There are the occasional hiccups, but, I’ll deal with those hiccups to not have to launch a windows vm machine every time I want to use the dude.

Now, if vmware would just write a native linux client for their vsphere client, I could get rid of the windows vm machine on my mac, and I’d be a happy boy… cause it just pukes all over itself in wine…

Thanks to all those who have had a hand in developing ROS and the mikrotik hardware; I have many a friend who make a living installing and supporting your products, and are always first to recommend it over the insanely priced equipment that do only a handful of the things your software/hardware does.

[KOPRajs]

Could You please provide the fixpipe.dll?

@stepw

Web-access under wine is also discussed here:
http://forum.mikrotik.com/t/dude-4-0beta2-web-access-under-wine/39781/1

Under Wine 1.2 on Centos 5 async ReadFileEx/WriteFileEx on named pipes used between Dude server and web-interface instances can return an error that Dude does not expect - ERROR_BROKEN_PIPE. In addition when ERROR_IO_PENDING is returned, Wine considers async read/write operation failed (returning FALSE), whereas Windows considers is completed successfully (returning TRUE)…

Anyway, long story short, it IS an easy fix. The following snippet can be used to handle ReadFileEx/WriteFileEx result for better Wine compatibility:

b = ReadFileEx(hFile, lpBuffer, nNumberOfBytesToRead, lpOverlapped, lpCompletionRoutine);
e = GetLastError();
if ((e == ERROR_BROKEN_PIPE) || (e == ERROR_IO_PENDING))
{
	b = TRUE;
	e = ERROR_IO_PENDING;
}

I’ve made a dll which hooks ReadFileEx and WriteFileEx once injected to dude.exe process and performs the above. This way web-instance handles named pipes correctly under Wine, opens the ports and accepts connections:

# netstat -nap | grep :22
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:2280                0.0.0.0:*                   LISTEN      11925/wineserver
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:2210                0.0.0.0:*                   LISTEN      11925/wineserver
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:2243                0.0.0.0:*                   LISTEN      11925/wineserver
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:2211                0.0.0.0:*                   LISTEN      11925/wineserver

There’s a caveat, Dude server and web-interface instances need to be started in sequence with sufficient delay, both with this injected dll for this to work, e.g.

wine loader.exe “dude.exe --server” fixpipe.dll
sleep 30
wine loader.exe “dude.exe --web” fixpipe.dll

This is cumbersome, I also hope they fix it in v.4b4.

PS For those who run dude as a service, for stopping the service

wine “dude.exe” --stop-server

command line can be used, which will gracefully shut down all running server instances.

[mistiq]

@Tony Burton

Using wine absolutely sucks for a service. Has anyone posted a definitive guide to running dude as a service on Linux?

I really need a way of starting and stopping the dude server automatically like any other Linux daemon, without a login.

It is easy to start Dude automatically on Linux using Xvfb:

 
Xvfb :1&
     export DISPLAY=:1
     cd /home/monitor/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Dude/
     WINEDEBUG=-all wine dude.exe &

[DonQ]

OK, I have a strange one. According to a MikroTik page (http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Talk:Dude_Linux_Installation) if you want to run The Dude as a client under Linux, and you get an error about a socket, it means The Dude, under wine, is trying to run as a server. To fix this, start up The Dude on a windows box and change it to run NOT ON THE LOCAL SERVER. Exit The Dude (TD) and copy a certain file from the Windows box to it’s corresponding place on the Linux box. Then fire up TD.

I did this and IT WORKED. Once… Since then I could not get it working like this ever again. I tried to view/edit the contents of this file, but it is totally not human readable. What gives? How to fix this?

Please consider a Linux version of TD please

[Johann]

Hello DonQ,
I run Dude under wine in production environment for five years. Please provide more details on your issue.
Johann

[CyB3RMX]

@normis

more people use windows than linux, it’s a fact. we have very few requests like this, less than one per month. use Wine, it works perfect.

i agree with you, most people use windows, but if RouterOS is linux based, and it support the dude server, how diffucult its to release a Dude server for linux?.

regards.!

[meconiotronic]

@CyB3RMX

@normis

more people use windows than linux, it’s a fact. we have very few requests like this, less than one per month. use Wine, it works perfect.

i agree with you, most people use windows, but if RouterOS is linux based, and it support the dude server, how diffucult its to release a Dude server for linux?.

regards.!

I agree please relase more software for linux. Winbox in wine run well but it doesn’t support drag and drop from winbox to linux

[ayufan]

@CyB3RMX

@normis

more people use windows than linux, it’s a fact. we have very few requests like this, less than one per month. use Wine, it works perfect.

i agree with you, most people use windows, but if RouterOS is linux based, and it support the dude server, how diffucult its to release a Dude server for linux?.

regards.!

It’s political issue, not the development.

You can run the dude using wine. And it works. Or you can virtualize RouterOS on x86 and use the demo key (level 1 license) which sufficient for dude installation.

[dual]

Hi, I have a little problen on my Ubuntu 12.04 x86_64 on PC. Winbox and dude are working fine. But when i move cursor over any item in dude it crashes when it tries to show the diagram with history of usage. I have also Ubuntu 12.04 x86 on my laptop but there everything works fine. The Dude version is v4.0beta3 on every machines and wine version is 1.4.1. Any idea ?

[batot]

@normis

more people use windows than linux, it’s a fact. we have very few requests like this, less than one per month. use Wine, it works perfect.

I thinking that your thinking it’s very simple.
Consider to what the recipient is directed the “DUDE”?
Is the casual user or the network administrator.
Then think about what operating system they use real adminitratorzy network? Give you a hint, it’s that I know including myself are using Linux only!

If you can not make software for Linux, Let go of the source in the form of Open Source and ensure someone remodel it for Linux.