Issue with new install

[hspindel]

pi.alert looked like a really cool idea, so I decided to give it a try. I've been wanting something that would notify me if a local device went down.

Some issues:

1. python3 back/pialert.py
   reports error: not found

but the web page does show local devices including the RaspberryPi. So I guess this isn't really a problem?

2. What does the owner field mean on the web page? Where does it get owner information? Same question for the Favorite and Group fields.

3. The install process couldn't find two of the files. The files were usr/share/arp-scan/ieee-oui.txt and /usr/share/arp-scan/ieee-iab.txt. There ARE two files in /usr/share/arp-scan named ieee-iab.txt.bak and ieee-oui.txt.bak. I renamed them without the .bak part, and that fixed the problem. Seems like a bug in the installer.

4. pi.alert got confused about devices connected to WiFi extenders. After research, it turned out that this was not a pi.alert problem. The WiFi extenders spoofed the MAC address reported on pings to be the same MAC address as the extender itself. Apparently a lot of extenders do this. So pi.alert sees two different IPs with the same MAC address. I don't blame pi.alert for getting confused by this - it confused me too!. Documenting here in case somebody else has a similar issue.

5. Would be nice if there was a way to check if email notifications are configured correctly by causing a test email to be sent. I had a lot of trouble getting email notifications sent. Tracked the problem down to the module pialert.py assuming that SMTP authorization is needed and trying to starttls. So I commented out two lines in pialert.py - calls to smtp_connection_login() and smtp_connection_starttls(). Now email notifications work. The pi.alert program needs a bit of work to support email over SMTP connections that do no authorization.

6. Very minor cosmetic only issue: In the file deviceDetails.php, the word Sessions is misspelled as Sesions on one of the web pages.

Overall, after getting through these configuration issues, pi.alert is working well and I really like the program. Had to configure my email client to ignore the messages about the devices behind WiFi extenders, but that is not pi.alert's fault. It would be nice if the pialert.conf file allowed me to specify IP addresses to ignore.

Thank you for developing this program!