HTTPS to a relay board could not work. Nearly every board that offers it signs
its own certificate — there is no authority anywhere that could have signed it —
so the request failed verification before it left.
A checkbox, per board, off by default. Not a blanket switch, because the other
HTTPS case is real and opposite: a board reached from outside through a proxy
with a genuine certificate, where verification is the only thing standing
between an antenna switch and the internet. Same setting, two boards, different
answers.
Off by default is only safe if the failure explains itself, so a certificate
error now names the box to tick. Go's own "x509: certificate signed by unknown
authority" is accurate and tells an operator nothing about what to do next.
Shown only once an https:// URL is actually in the board's configuration. A
board on plain HTTP has no certificate to argue about, and an option that cannot
matter yet is one more thing to wonder about.
The flag joins the driver cache key: ticking it has to rebuild the driver, or
the cached one would go on refusing the certificate with the verifying client it
already holds.
The boards that take a bare host — WebSwitch, KMTronic — keep verification. An
https:// typed there is the proxy case by construction, since they default to
plain HTTP on the LAN.
Three tests against a real self-signed TLS server: accepted with the box,
refused with a message naming it without the box, and one board's setting not
leaking into another's.
It was built the other way round on a misreading of two screenshots: the pattern
held {value} and the per-relay boxes held numbers to drop into it. The ask was
simpler and better — {value} is the name typed in Relay labels, so a switch
addressed by antenna name is one pattern instead of eight URLs:
http://10.10.10.100/relay?on={value} relay 1 named Ant1 → ?on=Ant1
Renaming the antenna re-addresses it, and the name on the button and the name on
the wire cannot drift apart because they are the same string. It works in the
per-relay URLs and in the patterns alike, so the per-relay boxes go back to
holding URLs and nothing about them changes meaning any more.
The label is percent-encoded with %20 rather than "+" for a space: "+" is a
space only in a query string and a literal plus in a path, and this can land in
either half of a URL.
{value} on a relay with no label would send "?on=", an empty parameter that most
boards answer with a cheerful 200 and no movement. The driver refuses it and
names the label as what is missing; the editor warns while it is being typed,
beside the empty box rather than after an antenna fails to switch. The labels
also join the driver's cache key — they are part of the wire format now.
buildDeviceDriver had no case for "httpgen", so the generic board fell through
to the WebSwitch driver: it polled an address it had never been given, reported
itself offline, greyed out every relay button, and sent none of the configured
URLs. Nothing in the interface said so — the board was configured, saved and
listed, and simply did nothing. deviceKey did not cover the URLs either, so once
that is fixed, correcting a typo in one would still have handed back the cached
driver holding the old address until a restart.
Two shapes of home-made switch could not be described at all:
- a bit-mask board whose four URLs differ by one character
(/Set0/1, /Set0/2, /Set0/4, /Set0/8) — {value} in the pattern now takes the
number from the per-relay box, keeping the address in one place;
- a board numbering its channels from zero — {relay-1}, since giving up the
pattern for eight hand-typed URLs was the only alternative.
The pattern decides what the per-relay boxes hold, and the grid says which as
soon as {value} is typed: guessing per box ("does this look like a URL?") would
change meaning on a typo, which is not a thing to do to something wired to an
antenna. A URL typed without a scheme gets http:// like the named boards get
from relayBase; https:// is passed through untouched.
Host and the connection test are gone for this type. It has no address of its
own — its relays may each live on a different box — and no status to read, so a
test could only ever answer "OK, 4 relays". Save was greyed out without a host,
which made a complete configuration of four full URLs impossible to store.
Cluster filters no longer persist across launches. A band lock set weeks earlier
is invisible to whoever set it: the counter reads 76 spots live, the grid is
empty, and the search goes to the cluster instead. Nobody loses work by
re-ticking a chip. Grouping and the panel state still persist — they change how
spots look, never whether they appear.
An operator was about to build band→relay mapping into the custom URL rows.
It already exists, and better: relay auto-control has a per-relay "band" rule
driving webswitch, KMTronic, Dingtian, Denkovi and USB boards. It holds state
so a relay is only commanded when its wanted position changed, reads the
boards live before the first apply so it does not re-command one already in
place, and carries per-relay labels. A URL fired on a band change has none of
that, and would have been a second definition of "which antenna on which band"
— the drift that cost us a week on counties.
So the gap was only the hardware: a hand-made switch is none of the five named
types. It is now the sixth, "HTTP relay": an ON URL and an OFF URL, either as
one pattern with {relay} substituted, or one pair per relay. The per-relay
form is the reason it exists — these boxes often have URLs with nothing in
common between channels (…/FF0101 and …/FF0201), which no pattern can express.
Status is remembered rather than read: most have no endpoint worth trusting.
The cost is stated in the code and the panel — after a restart every relay is
re-commanded once, which is harmless on a board with no memory and far better
than assuming an antenna is already selected.
And the Connections panel now says so, exactly where the wrong choice is made:
picking a band change with a URL transport shows a note pointing at Station
Control. The URL transport stays — a lookup pushed to a webhook or a QSO to a
dashboard is an event, not a state, and Station Control has no place for it.
rouggy