Manually

OS:: 🐧 Linux

Follow this guide to set up Desomnia on Linux manually, with full control over the binary placement and service configuration.

Prerequisites

Desomnia requires the .NET Runtime. If it is not provided as a package by your distribution, use the official script to download and install it into the default location, where it will be found automatically:

curl -sSL https://dot.net/v1/dotnet-install.sh | bash /dev/stdin --channel 10.0 -runtime dotnet --install-dir /usr/share/dotnet

For monitoring network services, the libpcap library is required. It is usually already present on most distributions. If it is missing, install it via your package manager. On Debian-based distributions (Ubuntu, Raspbian, etc.):

apt-get install libpcap0.8t64

In order to automatically configure your network interface for Wake-on-LAN and temporarily assign static address mappings, Desomnia additionally needs the following optional network tools:

apt-get install ethtool iproute2

Portable mode

To verify that Desomnia is compatible with your system and network infrastructure before committing to a full installation, you can run it in portable mode.

Download the appropriate binary for your platform from the GitHub Releases page. Set the executable permission with chmod +x ./desomniad, then create a suitable configuration file and place it next to the binary. Additional plugin archives can be placed in a subdirectory named plugins. Run the application as root with ./desomniad.

Filesystem layout

For a persistent installation, use the following locations in alignment with the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS):

/usr/sbin: Drop the binary for your platform and architecture here so it can be found automatically. Set the executable permission with chmod +x /usr/sbin/desomniad.

/etc/desomnia: Put a suitable monitor.xml into this location, to tell Desomnia what to do. You can also create a NLog.config file here, to configure additional logging, beside the console output.
/var/lib/desomnia/plugins: Here you can drop your additional plugins, which will be loaded when the programs starts.
/var/log/desomnia: Here you will find the log files, if you enabled file logging in the NLog.config and used ${var:logDir} as base path.

Service configuration

Create a systemd service unit to manage automatic start and stop:

/etc/systemd/system/desomnia.service

[Unit]
Description=Desomnia

[Service]
ExecStartPre=find /var/log/desomnia/ -type f -delete
ExecStart=desomniad
Restart=always
RestartSec=5

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

The ExecStartPre statement clears the log folder on each start, which is useful for debugging.

Starting and stopping

After creating or modifying the configuration file, reload systemd with systemctl daemon-reload. To start Desomnia automatically with the system, enable it with systemctl enable desomnia. Start the service with systemctl start desomnia and stop it gracefully with systemctl stop desomnia.

Journal

The INFO-level console output shows the most important actions Desomnia takes — such as waking remote hosts or sending knock packets — giving a quick overview of what the service is doing at any point in time. Warnings and errors are included as well.

To follow the live output from the systemd journal, run:

journalctl -u desomnia -f -n 80