Changing the Wiki Server Address in BobEXE

#1

I’m very new to BobEXE so perhaps I’m doing something obviously wrong. I was trying to get Bob to serve wikis in a way that is visible to machines on a Tailscale network. Maybe naively, I tried changing the 192… localhost address everywhere it appeared in the manual server settings to the 100… Tailscale ip address assigned to the machine. Clicking the “Update Settings” button when done editing causes the addresses to revert to the 192… address. Any idea what I am doing wrong?

Some details-

I’m using the lates BobEXE and it is just serving some test wikis, so not worried about experimenting. I tried to change “host” and “ipAddress” under “server info” and “host” under “ws-server.” Tailscale was definitely running at the time of trying this.

Given the “big note of DOOM,” “here be Dragons,” etc notices in Bob I can easily image that a) I’m doing it wrong and b) it won’t work anyway, but getting multiple wikis served to the local network and having that network actually be a Tailscale network so that I can be anywhere would be Tiddlywiki server nirvana for me, so I feel compelled to try.

#2

I had no idea what a " Tailscale network" network is.

  • Looking at it quickly suggests a VPN with a SSH emphasis
  • I am guessing you need to ensure you have access to the Bob server either on a LAN IP Address, or Local address only if the VPN terminates on the device running bob (and then maybe not).

If Bob and Tiddlywiki on node is set to listen on 0.0.0.0 then the server becomes available at all the IP Addresses on that computer (normally only one is available).

  • In node tiddlywiki we can set other addresses such as 127.0.4.100 (another local address) or 192.168.1.45 which is just one of multiple IP Addresses on the computer and valid on the LAN.
  • However there seems to be some interference from Bob’s configuration assumptions making this hard to configure. I have wasted many hours.
  • I believe just selecting “Make wikis available on the local network” ie listen on 0.0.0.0 is sufficient for 99% of the cases.

My use case in the past was assigning multiple LAN IP Addresses on my desktop and serving Bob on one of these. I could then move Bob to another computer taking its IP address with and all the links woul remain valid as the server is still found at the same IP address.

  • Using a Local DNS also can help eg bob.local domain :nerd_face:
#3

Thanks TW_Tones. The main problem was that I couldn’t change the addresses. I could edit them but when I tried to “Update Settings” they just revert to 192… I tried your suggestion to just set them to 0.0.0.0 and 2 out of 3 of the addresses I was trying to change are now 0.0.0.0 but ipAddress under serverInfo still reverts to the 192 address when I click “Update Settings” and when I check, that is the address that needs to be used to access my test wiki. In the meantime I stumbled across a three-year-old post of yours where you mentioned changing the same three address settings that I am trying to change and, at least back then, it worked for you.

Sorry for the lack of detail about Tailscale. I just wanted to mention that there was a point to trying to change those addresses. I figure if I can use VNC with the Tailscale assigned IP address to interact with my desktop machine remotely, I ought to be able to figure out how to serve some wikis using that address and interact with them remotely as well.

I’ll be off my local network later today and test things out as they are now. Maybe it will work.