I was playing with the various other methods of communication over reticulum. Stuff I couldn't find a realistic way of doing with Meshtastic.

I wasn't sure where to find my identity, so on one system I ran the following:

rnx -l

It produces a helpful warning saying it wont trust anyone, but it also spits out the hash for the identity it will use.

Next I try to connect to it from another system knowing it will fail:

rnx hasvaluehere ls

The system that's listening will spit out the hash of the system that tried to connect, so then I killed the listening process and ran it again:

rns -l -a hashthattriedtoconnectamomentago

Then calling the previous command again from the other system:

rnx hasvaluehere ls

It produced a directory listing. The command ran just fine.

Note that rnx doesn't run interactively by default, it executes and returns the results.

For an interactive session:

rnx -x hashvaluehere bash

Then it will read a line at a time and send it and send back the results. It's not really interactive, it can NOT be used for nvim or tmux, etc. Later on I would realize most of the utilities have T383838-p argument, you use the Listening on value as the target of whatever action and the identity as the value to accept (typically T383838-a.)

Like rnx it has to be running in order to talk to it. And it needs a list of allowed nodes. And then it's slower than telnet over dial-up if you happen to be using a radio -- BUT! -- It can run Neovim or tmux or anything. It's not faking it like rnx and buffering the line to send, it's fully interactive.

Like rnx it has to be running in order to talk to it, so you can't simply copy a file to it. When I used it, I used rnsh to connect to the endpoint navigate to a file, and then push it back to the system that I wanted a copy of the file on.

It took over an hour to send a 536KB file. I stopped paying attention around 40 minutes or so, I checked on it a few hours laters. The speed started out over 1.2 K/s but dropped down to the six hundred B/s range when I wandered a quarter of a mile or so away from the nearest node. The node was somewhat elevated but I was through the woods and properly in the forest. I think part of the problem was the rnsh hogging some bandwidth because I was pushing the file from the system that had the file to the system I was on for testing.

After walking home the speed improved a little, going back up to a peak of 900 B/s but what I was still impressed. It transferred the file, I know there was packet loss, but it still transferred the entire file without any real issues.

Tags: index, reticulum

created: 2026-05-04

(re)generated: 2026-07-17