tether

Reaching a vending machine that cannot be reached.

Machines sit behind carrier NAT with no fixed address, so there is nothing to connect to. Tether inverts that: a small agent on the board keeps one outbound connection open and waits. When somebody needs in, the machine is asked to open a tunnel from its side, and a root shell comes back through it.

Машин дээр Tether суулгаж байгаа ажилтан уу? Зааврыг эндээс үзнэ үү →

What it is for

A machine that has stopped selling, and nobody knows why. Before this, that meant driving to it. Now:

tether devices                     # what is out there, and what is up right now
tether shell <machine>             # a root shell on it
tether logs <machine> --app bvm    # what the vending app is actually saying
tether status <machine>            # the board's own diagnosis
tether reboot <machine>            # last resort, and it asks first

Why it is separate from the vending backend

Tether exists to reach a machine whose application is wedged. Putting its command plane inside that application's backend would reintroduce, one layer up, the dependency it was built to avoid. It runs on boards that are not vending machines at all, and it keeps working when everything else has stopped.

Who can use it

People, not shared secrets. tether login is the only way in — there is no token to paste — so the audit trail names whoever opened a machine rather than recording the same word every time. Three roles: viewer sees the fleet, operator gets into machines, admin commissions boards and manages people.

Ask an admin for an account. Then download the client, or read the documentation.