Thoughts on a panel applet that does the PIA homepage check to monitor "protected" or not?

gnutoo

Hi all,

One of the things I find I am in a habit of doing is hitting the pia home page to "get the green" so to speak.

I use a number of different linux distros and generally don't bother with the thick-client and do the setup in openVPN.

I got to thinking that a bash script, python or javascript applet could monitor the header on the pia homepage and by a simple curl or wget and grep determine if the http request returns "You are protected by PIA"...

I did a bash script that uses wget to pull the page then pipes cat index.html to grep with an if statement that checks for the relevant text - but I don't really know how to code properly and wondered if anyone had tackled something like this for general openvpn tunnel heart-beat type monitoring.

I thought a cinnamon panel applet (javascript) that had a simple green or red light and could be clicked to force the check and maybe a popup notification if the state changed between regular automated checks (say every 5 min) could be very useful?

Don't really know where to start beyond what I've tried so I thought I'd throw the idea out and see if anyone else is interested or relates to the usecase...

Writing applets seems relatively easy once you get started...
ie: http://developer.linuxmint.com/reference/git/cinnamon-tutorials/write-applet.html

Best,
Will;

martouf

try scraping this instead https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/pages/whats-my-ip/

and write your first version with bash (and awk and/or sed and/or grep and/or ...)

gnutoo

Cool; so here is a successful start.  very crude I know

[email protected]:~/Code$ ./first_scrape.sh 

you are protected by pia

[email protected]:~/Code$ ./first_scrape.sh 

you are not protected by pia

[email protected]:~/Code$ ./first_scrape.sh 

you are protected by pia

[email protected]:~/Code$ 

[email protected]:~/Code$ ls

first_output.txt  first_scrape.sh  scrape-data.txt

so switching the vpn off and back on yielded the hoped for results.

here is the script

[email protected]:~/Code$ cat first_scrape.sh 

#!/bin/bash

###  BEGIN PIA PROTECTED TEST

        wget -q -O scrape-data.txt https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/pages/whats-my-ip/  

        if grep 'You are protected by PIA' scrape-data.txt > first_output.txt

        then

                echo "you are protected by pia"

        else

                echo "you are not protected by pia"

        fi

[email protected]:~/Code$ 

Now I need to work out how to write an applet that calls this and does it with the cinnamon dock
Update:-

crude attempt to frame up something that will start the applet ball rolling - doesn't work.  Some problem converting the .sh to utf8.

[email protected]:/usr/share/cinnamon/applets# cd check_pia\@cinnamon.org/

[email protected]:/usr/share/cinnamon/applets/[email protected]# cat applet.js 

const Applet = imports.ui.applet;

const Util = imports.misc.util;

function check_pia(orientation, panel_height, instance_id) {

            this._init(orientation, panel_height, instance_id);

}

check_pia.prototype = {

            __proto__: Applet.IconApplet.prototype,

            _init: function(orientation, panel_height, instance_id) {

                            Applet.IconApplet.prototype._init.call(this, orientation, panel_height, instance_id);

                            this.set_applet_icon_name("PIA Checker");

                            this.set_applet_tooltip(_("Click here to check PIA"));

                        },

            on_applet_clicked: function() {

                            Util.spawn("/home/will/Code/first_scrape.sh");

                        }

};

function main(metadata, orientation, panel_height, instance_id) {

            return new check_pia(orientation, panel_height, instance_id);

}

martouf

yep. example of why people who do this kind of work are 'Developers'.

now, there's all sorts of good information on that whats-my-ip page. get more of it with a command line option? always good to self-document with the output from the --help option. try next to not use temp files.

gnutoo

Yes, rather than worry about the applet I think I'll try to get a shell script that writes a text file with a good portion of the information I can scrape and then that could form the basis of an applet that simply presents the text in that file.