Is there a list of "standard aspects" for lxmf?

[radio-miskovice]

Hello, I want to create a radio-only network, with no internet connections, using reticulum and lxmf. I have a trouble understanding how the whole thing works. Radio interfaces in two points (my friend's and mine) seem to "see" each other as we can see some announcements. However, except announcements nothing seems to go through, even lxmf messages to other peers who appeared in the announcement stream.
One of the problems that seem to block me is to determine what are my adresses.
I run rnsd 0.8.8 and know the transport node and the probe responder destinations- these are shown in rnstatus output.
On the same machine runs LXMD 0.5.8 but I cannot see any activity.
How do I find out what are the destinations of my LXMD? I suppose there should be at least Node (to serve micron pages) and Propagation Node (to route messages from other applications in the same LAN and to send out to the radio interface those which are sent to outside destinations).
I could not find any reference list with "standard aspects" - shouldn't some be included in the documentation?

[markqvist]

I suppose there should be at least Node (to serve micron pages)

The lxmd program cannot serve micron pages, it is exclusively a daemon program for handling LXMF messages, and primarily for running a headless LXMF propagation node. You don't need lxmd to send direct messages between LXMF addresses.

How do I find out what are the destinations of my LXMD?

If you really do want to use lxmd to receive messages, just look at the log output when starting it:

[2025-01-03 12:14:48] [Notice] LXMF Router ready to receive on <c56d3482fd36a4d352e553901a15a407>

In this case, the lxmd program will receive messages on c56d3482fd36a4d352e553901a15a407. The default action for lxmd is to just delete messages when they come in, though. Receiving messages directly on lxmd is mostly meant for integration purposes with other systems and similar stuff.

If you just want to get messaging up and running between a few different devices on an isolated network, it is much easier to get started with one of the fully implemented messaging clients:

• Sideband
• MeshChat
• NomadNet

Each of these programs will display their own LXMF address in the user interface. You can either copy/paste that address to another program, manually type it in, or simply send an announce from the program. If you send an announce, anyone else on your network should receive that announce, and you can then start a conversation by clicking the relevant option on the announce (for example, in Sideband click the little menu icon on the announce and select "Converse").

Hope that helps!

[radio-miskovice]

Thank you.

If I understand correctly, LXMD should act as propagation node. This is exactly what I want - in the first step to use it for MeshChat instances running elsewhere in LAN as their default propagation node. But with LXMD running I cannot see any announces from it. What am I doing wrong? The announce interval is set to 10 minutes:

[propagation]
enable_node = yes
announce_interval = 10
announce_at_start = yes
autopeer = yes

# I want my node to serve only clients in LAN and talk with the nearest LoRa node
autopeer_maxdepth = 2

propagation_transfer_max_accepted_size = 256
auth_required = no

Also, I was a little bit confused that .lxmd/config has two sections, [propagation] and [lxmf]. Now I understand that propagation defines the propagation node and lxmf would serve as destination to handle any specific messages (such as, for example, collecting APRS packets heard by VHF receiver and forwarded via lxmf) if I define a handler program in this section. However, how would I determine the destination for such messages? Using rnid -i identity -a <some specific aspect> or something else?

[radio-miskovice]

This is my idea of the local architecture. The NomadNet node is not visible in LAN, the LXMD propagation node is not announced (or not seen) in LAN in MeshChat. Nothing seems to pass out to the LoRa interface.

As for the rnsd, it has only LoRa interface and TCP Server interface enabled. I can see LoRa transmitting, it also receives announces but nothing else works - no messages can be sent nor received in NomadNet on the same Zero (when UI is started), nor in MeshChat connected in LAN.

[markqvist]

General architecture is looking good. If you want to simplify, you can also let nomadnet run the LXMF propagation node. If you want more flexibility and configuration options, run it separately as lxmd.

As for the questions, we need to see the Reticulum configuration file on your node to get an idea why you're not seeing any announces anywhere.

[radio-miskovice]

I went through some source code as well as config files. Found at least one error: in .nomadnetwork/config in section [node] enable_node was set to no by mistake. After fixing this I could again see the index.mu page. One issue solved.

So from this point of view the NomadNet part from my picture works. It produces two destinations, one is for nomadnetwork.node which is what I want and the other one is for lxmf.delivery which is definitely not what I wanted.

As for the LXMD, it is running, it announces its lxmf.delivery destination (that I do not want to use or have at all) but in MeshChat I cannot see any announcements from lxmf.propagation, which is what I would expect should be there in any case. I can send you my config files via e-mail, whatsapp or telegram, if you were willing to look at them.

However, I assume some of this is due to bugs in MeshChat. Besides missing or not showing propagation nodes, in Windows it cannot render some features of the markdown: centered line, text background, these two I tried and found not working. Obviously I should find MeshChat repo and post some issues there :)

[radio-miskovice]

P.S. in the final stage I want to keep only RNSD and LXMD, LXMD providing propagation node only. I would like to get rid of the lxmf.delivery destination in LXMD but I have to look what is the best way to achieve that. It is quite late already and I have to go to bed :) I guess either I have to omit the whole [lxmf] section or just fiddle wit the announcement parameters.

NomadNet nodes and peers would then be somewhere else in the LAN and the Zero+RNode would only serve as gateway/interface.

In the next phase lxmf.delivery in LXMD could receive data, preprocess them and distribute to other applications unless I find better approach how to handle this kind of use cases.