Running a Webserver on the Polisy Pro

[TriLife]

Greetings!

I've been tinkering with an Arduino Mega to sense pool chemistry etc and have a small local server running off it.

As I'm trying to add more data on that page from solar system, weather station etc, I'm being told that putting the Arduino onto the Internet would be criminally negligent... So, since I have a few Raspberry Pis in my closet, that seemed like a natural choice, being cape of https, cryptologic etc.

When I described my topography on the RPI forum, one of the first comments was: "do you really have a Polisy Pro? If so, you could create a Subdomain on it and run your servers from there"...

By now you have probably realized that I'm a bloody noob and have no idea what this kind soul (DrTechno) is referring to. Can someone please point in the right direction?

Oh, and I also recall that Polisy is running a flavor of Linux. Which one is it, so I can try to educate myself on that too...

There is definitely more "educating" going and than productive work... Getting old sucks!

Cheers

[bpwwer]

The Polisy Pro is not running Linux, it's running FreeBSD.  They are different operating systems.

While the hardware (and FreeBSD) are both capable of running a general purpose web server, I don't believe that UDI packages up any of the general purpose web server programs or other related software necessary to run one.  Also, if you're using the Polisy to run Polyglot, Polyglot is a custom web server so you'd have to careful not to have anything you install conflict with that.

My first question would be why do you want a publicly accessible web server on the Internet?

Maintaining a public facing web server is a lot of work and typical home Internet providers prohibit running one because of the load/security issues.  To make it accessible, you would also need to purchase a domain name, and configure DNS and have some way to map the your external (possibly changing) IP address to the domain name. 

If you really need a public facing web site, you're much better off purchasing one from a hosting provider. They end up doing most of the heavy lifting and you just have to create/add the content.  Your ISP may even provide some limited web serving for you.

If you just want a web server that is only visible to the devices on your local home network, then hosting it on the Arduino is fine (or on a RPi).  Security is much less of an issue since only someone logged into your WiFi or router would be able to access it.

[TriLife]

3 minutes ago, bpwwer said:

The Polisy Pro is not running Linux, it's running FreeBSD.  They are different operating systems.

While the hardware (and FreeBSD) are both capable of running a general purpose web server, I don't believe that UDI packages up any of the general purpose web server programs or other related software necessary to run one.  Also, if you're using the Polisy to run Polyglot, Polyglot is a custom web server so you'd have to careful not to have anything you install conflict with that.

My first question would be why do you want a publicly accessible web server on the Internet?

Maintaining a public facing web server is a lot of work and typical home Internet providers prohibit running one because of the load/security issues.  To make it accessible, you would also need to purchase a domain name, and configure DNS and have some way to map the your external (possibly changing) IP address to the domain name. 

If you really need a public facing web site, you're much better off purchasing one from a hosting provider. They end up doing most of the heavy lifting and you just have to create/add the content.  Your ISP may even provide some limited web serving for you.

If you just want a web server that is only visible to the devices on your local home network, then hosting it on the Arduino is fine (or on a RPi).  Security is much less of an issue since only someone logged into your WiFi or router would be able to access it.

Wow, that's a whole lot of answer, very fast! Thanks Bpwwr!

I'd like to have access to the data my sensors produce, while I'm away and maybe even control one or the other actuator... If there is a secure way of doing it, other than a Webserver, please let me know.

I guess one way to do it is dialling into the RPi via VNC, or even SSH and accessing the "local" data that way.

Or staying on the Arduino platform, but with a MKR1010 Wifi, which has a nifty Cloud interface already...

I already own several domains, mostly so I can have personalized email addresses for the family.

But, following your train of thought of using a third party to host a website for a moment: how do I get the information from my Arduino on this site? And some of the instruments, which do not have a cloud portal?

Pardon my nooby questions...

[danbutter]

You could try https://esphome.io/ with https://www.home-assistant.io/

There is also an awesome ISY integration.   Careful though...this rabbit hole is deeeep!