Iain Melville replied to the topic 'One Server Two Clients' in the forum. 4 years ago

Just to add to this old thread - I would like to run two clients - one in the obsy and one in the house. 2 reasons - no autofocusser so I need a large-ish screen outside to focus on (same as OP). I also have a dome with a shutter aperture which is not motorised so I have to rotate it when first setting up or changing targets. My wifi is not quite good enough to vnc from the obsy to the router and back again and running the client (Mac) inside the house is great although sometimes the image downloads take 10's of seconds - I'm fine with that and plan is to run ethernet to house eventually. I also like not having to run kstars etc on the pi which keeps the load down. I've done a comparison running htop on the pi with kstars running there and vnc'ing in to control and using the remote client on the mac the difference in cpu load is huge.

So if I connect the laptop outside as a remote client to the pi (ethernet), slew, set up and focus then go inside and try to connect I have to basically kill indi server and restart the whole shebang from indoors, during which the mount will stop tracking etc.. It would be really nice to set up on the laptop outside (which is ethernet wired to the pi) focus, slew to a target, set up guiding maybe and then come in and connect to the same INDI server from inside as a second remote client which would then also receive images.

I have tried this multple times including last night when I found I had problems receiving images while plate solving from inside. What I found when I vnc'd to the pi this morning was a load of FITS viewer screens open on the pi, so what in fact happened was - I think - the pi was running kstars (I must have left it running) and INDI server was started for this kstars instance. The laptop connected to this INDI in client mode, while I slewed and moved the dome etc. then I connected the mac in client mode and although I could control - in the sense of issuing commands to the indi server - from my remote client on the mac, the images were being sent to the original (first) connection. I suppose INDI maintained the original pi client connection as the target for the images, which kind of makes sense if only one client connection is supported. Otherwise the server would have to multicast images to all clients.

Obviously I am not using as intended but you can see my use case requirement? I need a screen (client) outside connecting to the pi (or an autofocusser!) and a client running inside the house.

I think I might be able to achieve a half-way house solution by disconnecting the laptop ekos client outside (but leaving the indi server running) once done with focussing then re-connecting from the house thereby maintaining just one client connection and not interrupting tracking. Otherwise I just kill the server remotely and start a new instance and plate solve again (which all happens on the pi) from inside the house but that takes a few minutes.

I would just be interested to hear from others who maybe do not have autofocussers and need a screen in the obsy to work from and then control remotely from elsewhere.

Cheers
Iain

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