Tag Archives: wemo

Update on the Belkin WeMo Switch

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As I noted previously I was less then pleased with the WeMo. Basically I had to put in a few hacks to allow me to manage it via RPi and the excellent ouimeaux tool rather then the provided app and/or IFTTT.

It seemed that anything ‘cloudy’ wasn’t working at all. Possibly because my home router was in turn sitting behind a CG-NAT solution, possibly not…

Thankfully the latest set of firmware updates (now running WeMo_WW_2.00.8643.PVT-OWRT-SNS) seems to have sorted all of those issues. Android app works as expected (can turn it on and off) from both the local network and remotely, as can IFTTT, so I’m definitely happier with the product now then when I bought it.

Persistent Reverse-SSH Tunnels with autossh and screen

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I’ve been working to manage my place remotely as I tend to have irregular hours. As a pilot I put in a Raspberry Pi and got a Belkin WeMo Switch. I had two problems with this setup;

  1. The internet connection is NAT-ed
  2. The Belkin cloud-y manager thing doesn’t seem to work (neither does IFTTT)

My solution was to use the RPi to manage the WeMo, and to have a reverse-ssh tunnel between the RPi and my public server.

  1. Ensure that passwordless SSH is working between the RPi and the server – plenty of guides online about how to do this.
  2. Open a screen session
  3. Use autossh to open and maintain the tunnel
$ autossh -M 65500 -o ServerAliveInterval=20 -R 11141:localhost:22 [email protected]

Autossh will use ports 65500 and 65501 to send echo data over and back between server and host, and opening an ssh session on the public server to local port 11141 will tunnel back to the SSH port on the RPi

ssh -p 11141 [email protected]

While this works fine, there is a potential issue – if the RPi is rebooted/looses power for any reason, the tunnel will be gone so we need to automate the setup so that it will be fired up upon boot – we will use a crontab entry for this:

@reboot /usr/bin/screen -S reverse-ssh-tunnel -d -m autossh -M 65500 -i /home/pi/.ssh/id_rsa -o "ServerAliveInterval 20" -o "ServerAliveCountMax 3" -R 11141:localhost:22 [email protected]

This cron entry will open a screen on reboot with “reverse-ssh-tunnel” as the title, and issue the autossh command. Reboot the RPi to test and you should be good to go.

Simples 🙂