[Ovmsdev] server documentation discrepancies

[Mark Webb-Johnson]

Lee,

I've updated the README to be more up-to-date. The UDP comments (and protocol description) were several years out of date. Documentation on the server is, as you say, very limited.

The protocol document (in 'docs' directory) is up-to-date and describes the protocol well. I know of a few people who have worked off that (and the app/script examples) to build their own clients.

The perl scripts other than ovms_server.pl are really just one-offs used for development and testing - you do not need them at all.

If you want to deploy an OVMS server, you will need the ovms_server.pl script, the ovms_server.conf configuration file suitably configured, the ovms_server.sql database tables in a mysql database, and optionally the *.vece files (to convert error code to messages for different vehicle types). It is simplest to run the server either on a mac or linux box (Windows might be possible, but would most likely be a nightmare). There are a large number of perl requirements (see the 'use' statements at the top of ovms_server.pl) - these can be installed as packages or directly via cpan. If anything is missing, when you run ovms_server.pl, perl will complain and abort until you get it right.

From a database point of view, you just need to insert a record into ovms_cars for each vehicle. The record references an owner, which is in the ovms_owners table. The important, and non-obvious, fields have a comment in the SQL schema provided. The other tables are populated by the ovms_server.pl code, based on vehicle/app interactions, so you can ignore them.

Hope the above helps, and if you have any questions please ask.

Regards, Mark.

On 2 Jul, 2014, at 6:35 am, Lee Howard <lee.howard at mainpine.com> wrote:

> Hello All,
> 
> I'm finding some apparent discrepancies in the limited documentation (one README file) for the server.  If I'm missing something please feel free to clue me in.
> 
> 1)  "The car protocol is built on UDP using encrypted communication packets."
> 
> I do not see ovms_server.pl opening or listening on a UDP socket.  I see it operating on TCP ports 6867 and 6868.
> 
> 2)  "The server also includes a web interface for basic functions such as setting the password, registering
> the car and checking status."
> 
> I do not see this web interface anywhere.
> 
> The documentation is severely lacking in explaining what the various perl scripts do... although in most cases this can be deduced with some examination.  The perl scripts, themselves, contain little-to-no internal comments.
> 
> As I presently don't really need to have the web interface mentioned in #2 I would be happy to configure the user and car accounts manually from a MySQL command-line.  However, since the SQL database structure is undocumented, it appears that I'll need to just do my best at guessing how that's done.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Lee.
> 
> -- 
> *Lee Howard*
> *Mainpine, Inc. Chief Technology Officer*
> Tel: +1 866 363 6680 | Fax: +1 360 462 8160
> lee.howard at mainpine.com | www.mainpine.com
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