Hello! I’ve been experimenting a bit with the telnet interface hamalert.org:7300. I am able to login successfully and use the commands mentioned under https://hamalert.org/destinations (sh/dx 20 and set/json). I see streaming alerts as expected, in either text or json - so everything works fine!
My question is - is there a full list of supported commands published anywhere? Or any kind of “help” command interface I could use? I’ve tried a handful of commands like help, h, list, ?, and so forth, with no luck so far.
There are no supported commands other than those already documented (sh/dx N and set/json). The cluster emulation is very basic, as it is intended to support only the bare minimum necessary to stream alerts to some other application.
Hey, as a quick follow-up question… Would it be possible to implement any kind of “heartbeat” type of command, to ensure the connection is active?
I’m experimenting a bit with a python-based monitor of the telnet feed via an asynchronous i/o library… I’m currently relying on the underlying telnet protocol itself to know if/when a disconnection happens.
It might be more robust if there could be some kind of heartbeat command to verify the client is still able to communicate with the server - just something really simple like hb or something to get a standard reply (maybe just the string “ok” or something) - or if you wanted to make something arguably more useful/flexible, maybe support for a time or datetime command that replies with the current system time/datetime?
Just throwing out some ideas - let me know if you feel like implementing something like that.
Looking at the server-side code, I realize I forgot to mention one previously undocumented command. If you send echo foo, the server will send back foo.
There is none, but the setting is only per Telnet session and not persistent, so if you simply don’t send that command in a new Telnet session, then you won’t get JSON output.
