Remote w/ TCP Telnet

English mAirList 7.x
1

We are planning to built a simple webinterface for our some of our users to control select functions of one MairList instance.

In order to explore the basic functionality of the built-in TCP/IP server first, we opened a Telnet connection to the server. It’s connecting, displaying the connecting client’s IP on the status line.

But no command is working. We tried some simple examples like the one suggested in the Wiki at

https://wiki.mairlist.com/config:remotecontrol:tcp

PLAYOUT1 PLAYER 1-1 START
or PLAYER 1-1 START

There is no password set. What is it we don’t do right?

Would it be better to use the REST API? Technically this should all be the same more or less. Unfortunately there is little documentation available.

2

With the TCP Server remote control, you just open a TCP connection to the configured port, and send the commands followed by a carriage return (ASCII 13).

It just tried it with Netcat, and it works fine.

You should also see the commands being echoed in the Remote Control Console in the About menu.

If you want to use the REST server instead, just make a POST or GET request to /execute, with the command passed as the command parameter (query parameter for GET, x-www-url-form-encoded for POST).

GET /execute?command=PLAYER%201-1%20START
3

The Remote Control Console is showing my connecting Telnet Client (MobaXTerm, since Netcat seems to be to complicated for me to understand). But commands don’t show up, even when I am sending them with ALT-13 (ASCII 13). Same with PUTTY. It’s working at Thorben’s lab. So something is probably wrong with our setup. We will keep on testing. MairList is running anyway, but it would be a nice thing to have.

4

Firewall issues?  

5

All firewalls are off on our internal network, otherwise the Telnet client couldn’t connect at all.

6

Do you happen to know how to create Wireshark dumps?

7

This issue has been sitting for a while (since Aug 2025), but I didn’t give up to get this working.

Finally I was able to establish a working REST connection. But…

User authentication works through the local config (auth.db), but not via the database

Some commands are working, others aren’t. To simple examples for the very same player:

PLAYER 1-1 VOLUME is moving the volume control

PLAYER 1-1 START or PLAYER 1-1 STOP does nothing

The latter commands are logged in the remote console, so they are obvisously beeing received by the system.

Being an experienced user but no IT engineer. Since the documentation is so limited the whole process felt like reverse engineering the system. I spent hours testing.

What is it I possibly I did not see to start and stop the player?

8

This depends on the state of the auto mode. In this case it only could/would work in ASSIST-Mode. Even experienced users often forget about it.

In AUTO-Mode you could chain a command like

AUTOMATION 1 ON/OFF;PLAYER 1-1 START

Or, if staying in AUTO is okay, just use

AUTOMATION 1 NEXT

to start the next element in the playlist.

If the commands are received correctly in the remote window this may be the problem. Could you give it a try?

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9

Hi Stefan,

got it. Thanks so much! MairList has so many great features, but since the documentation is really poor, simple tasks can take a lot of time to get solved. This hint was very helpful!

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