Brendan's Tech Ramblings – Page 15

Brendan's Tech Ramblings

The Joys of Unreliable Internet
I’ve had a strange issue with my Internet for the last few months, it’s rock solid during the day and I have no issues at all, however from around 8pm onwards, it becomes unreliable – ping times go through the roof or I lose connectivity intermittently. This used to occur one night a week or so but for the past couple of weeks it has been happening 2-3 times a week which is seriously affecting my Netflix consumption 😀.

I have a FTTP connection and there doesn’t appear to be a fault with the fibre connection into my property as the fibre connection light on the ONT is green when the Internet grinds to a halt. I reported this to my ISP who requested I contact them when the issue is active so that they can perform some diagnostics.

I decided to collect some data on the issue to help me identify any patterns with this and also as evidence for my ISP. As I mentioned in a previous post I have a lot of spare Raspberry Pi’s so decided to put one of them to some good use!

I connected the Pi directly via Ethernet to my router and wrote a quick and dirty PowerShell script that uses the Speedtest CLI Python script written by Matt Martz to perform a speed test of my connection every 5 minutes. Yes, you read that correctly – you can run PowerShell on the Raspberry Pi, here is a guide on how to set this up. I used PowerShell to call the Python script for no other reason than I’d never done it before so it seemed like a good experiment.

Below is the script that I ran, this uses the Speedtest CLI to perform a test every 5 minutes and writes the output to a CSV file.
```
$i = 0
while ($i -eq 0)
{
    $Time = Get-Date
    $SpeedTest = /usr/local/bin/speedtest-cli --simple
    $Time.ToString() + "," + $SpeedTest[0] + "," + $SpeedTest[1] + "," + $SpeedTest[2]  >> /home/pi/Share/SpeedTest.csv 
    Start-Sleep -Seconds 300
}
```
Here is what the output looks like in Excel, I’m going to collect data for a few days before I crack open Power BI and do some analysis of the data.
June 15, 2021
More Raspberry Pi and Container Goodness!
Next up in my quest to learn more about running containers on a Raspberry Pi, was to test a container that I created a while ago when I was ramping up on Flask and Python. I created a basic container that generates a list of 8 random exercises (from a pool of 26), I was in the process of putting together a new workout regime at the time, so this seemed like a perfect way to build something that had practical use in my life.

The first thing I needed to do was download the repo to my Raspberry Pi, to do this I ran the following command (from within the directory I wanted to temporarily store the downloaded repo).
```
git clone https://github.com/brendankarl/Containers
```
Once I had the repo downloaded locally on my Pi, I needed to change into the directory that housed the specific container I was interested in (WorkoutGenerator) as the repo has others.
```
cd Containers/WorkoutGenerator
```
I then needed to create the image using Docker Build, the command below references the Dockerfile within the repo and names the image “workoutgenerator”.
```
docker build -t workoutgenerator ./
```
Once this command complete, I could then run the image, exposing port 80 on the container to the Raspberry Pi so that I could access it from within my network. If you are interested in exposing things externally ngrok is a great free tool I’d recommend taking a look at.
```
docker run -d -p 80:80 workoutgenerator
```
A quick peek into Docker using the Visual Studio Code extension and I could see the container running and the images added to support this.

Finally, I launched a browser and hit the IP address of the Raspberry Pi to check that everything was running correctly – voila it was working!

I refreshed the page a couple of times to verify that the exercises were updated.

That’s enough containers for me today…..I need a workout 😂.
June 7, 2021
Running Docker on a Raspberry Pi
I’ve been playing around with Docker and containers for the last year or so, primarily by running Docker Desktop on my Windows 10 device and experimenting with Azure Container Instances. I even shared one of the containers that I created on GitHub – https://github.com/brendankarl/Containers, a super-advanced Workout Generator app 😀.

As I have more Raspberry Pi’s than I care to admit, I’m always looking for new ways to use them and reduce the guilt I feel when I see them abandoned on my desk.

I’d read that you could run Docker on a Raspberry Pi, however I’d never got round to playing around with this…and to honest I expected it to be a bit of a palaver.

I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was to get Docker installed and my first container running on a Pi – it took a mere six commands!
```
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
curl -sSL https://get.docker.com | sh
sudo usermod -aG docker ${USER}
sudo pip3 install docker-compose
sudo systemctl enable docker
sudo docker run -d -p 80:80 hypriot/rpi-busybox-httpd
```
This installs Docker and Docker Compose, enables Docker to startup automatically on boot and runs the https://github.com/hypriot/rpi-busybox-httpd image, which is a straightforward way to verify that Docker is working correctly (by running a lightweight web server). Once these commands finished executing, I launched a browser and connected to the IP of my Pi and was greeted with this – success!

As a side note Visual Studio Code with the Remote Development and Docker extensions is a great way to do remote development and manage Docker on a Raspberry Pi from Windows or Mac.
May 27, 2021