Monitor

unseenet-monitor shows how your node is doing, at a glance: traffic in the last hour, your peers and whether they answer, storage, Tor, warnings and the node's last log lines.

It is a program of its own. It only reads from the node and cannot change anything; the node runs on whether the monitor is open or not.

Start it

On a node set up with install-node.sh, just run:

unseenet-monitor

That starts it as the node's user, who owns the stats socket. Elsewhere, run it as the node's user yourself:

sudo -u unseenet /home/unseenet/unseenet/.venv/bin/unseenet-monitor

It finds the node in the usual places (node-data/monitor.sock in the current directory, in your home, or in /home/unseenet). Otherwise name the node's stats socket:

unseenet-monitor --node /home/unseenet/node-data/monitor.sock

Over SSH it works the same way: ssh -t mynode sudo -u unseenet .../unseenet-monitor.

Several nodes on one machine? Give --node once for each, and switch with N and P.

The monitor needs Textual, like the client: pip install "unseenet[monitor]" (install-node.sh installs it).

Key
1 ... 4	Peers, Groups, Rejected, Log
N / P	Next / previous node
R	Refresh now (it refreshes every 2 seconds)
Q	Quit

What it shows

• The node: name, version, onion address, node key, uptime, Tor, open connections, groups and articles, storage and free disk, its policy.
• Per minute, last hour: articles accepted (from clients, peers and catching up), sent to peers, read by clients, rejected - and the totals since the node started.
• Warnings: Tor not running or still starting, a peer that has not answered for a day, a long queue for a peer, little disk space.
• Peers: how each is authenticated, articles waiting and sent, the last catch-up (UN-RFC 0017) and the last error.
• Groups: the groups with the most articles.
• Rejected: why articles were refused (postage, signature, size, unknown group, duplicate, ...) - a sudden rise can mean someone is testing your node.
• Log: the node's last log lines.

The stats interface

The node serves the numbers on a Unix socket in its data directory, monitor.sock, readable only by the node's user (and its group). It is never reachable over Tor, and the node refuses to serve it on anything but this computer.

unseenet-node --data node-data --monitor node-data/monitor.sock   # the default
unseenet-node --data node-data --monitor 127.0.0.1:1120           # Windows, tests
unseenet-node --data node-data --monitor off

It answers one request per line with one line of JSON: stats gives a snapshot, log 100 the last log lines. That makes it easy to use from other tools as well:

printf 'stats\n' | sudo -u unseenet nc -U /home/unseenet/node-data/monitor.sock | jq .traffic

The format is described at the top of src/unseenet/node/stats.py ("v": 1).

Nothing about readers

The numbers are counters only. The node does not record who reads what - not even which groups or articles are read, only how many articles were served in total - as the node's logging policy (UN-RFC 0011) promises.