Minimalist Prober for Modern Forms Fans

This came from discussion on Home Assistant forum, where a few users of Modern Forms fans were finding their fans to stop responding over time. I wanted to build a simple prober service outside the HA codebase to see if excessive probing was causing the problem, or perhaps something else was the cause.

Note: All API commands are from the code-base of the Modern Forms integration, since I was unable to find any documented API elsewhere.

Usage

NOTE: This is assuming you are using the binary release from the Releases page.

Basic usage:

mffprober hostname.or.ip.address

There are a few other flags of interest:

• count: Maximum number of probes (0 means unlimited).
• exit-on-error: DEPRECATED: Use maxfail=0 to disable, or a positive value to control (default true).
• host string: DEPRECATED: Specify host name/address after the flags.
• interval: Polling interval in seconds (default 10 seconds).
• maxfail: Maximum number of failed probes (0 means unlimited) (default 1).
• quiet: Log only polling errors.
• reboot: Reboot fan. Ignores most flags.
• timeout: Polling probe timeout in seconds (default 1 second).
• version: Show version.

Binary Releases

Binary releases can be found on the Releases page.

Currently, the binaries are available for:

• Linux (tgz, apk, rpm, deb)
  • amd64
  • armhf
  • arm64
• Windows
  • 32bit
  • 64bit
• macOS
  • Universal

Installing Linux binaries using apt

Linux users who use Debian-based systems (Debian, Ubuntu, etc.) can also use apt to install, and keep up to date with the releases, as with any other package.

Releases are signed with my personal GPG key. In order to install packages, you need to add this key for use with apt.

WARNING: Most of the instructions on how to do that on the Internet are inherently unsafe, alas there is no commonly agreed-upon alternative (1, 2). What follows is my suggested approach.

• Download key to /etc/apt/keyrings

  sudo mkdir -p /etc/apt/keyrings/
  curl -Ls https://github.com/icemarkom/gpg-key/releases/latest/download/markom@gmail.com.asc \
  | sudo tee /etc/apt/keyrings/markom@gmail.com.asc

• Add repository to /etc/apt/sources.list.d

  echo 'deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/markom@gmail.com.asc] https://github.com/icemarkom/mffprober/releases/latest/download/ /' \
  | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mffprober.list

• Update apt

  sudo apt update

• Install mffprober

  sudo apt install mffprober