I’ve had an issue where I wasn’t sure if my dynamic DNS provider registered properly. I then realized that I have a piKVM attached to one of my servers that boots on powerup, even if the server does not. I could utilize this piKVM to help me out.

Thanks to inspiration from Chris Dzombak I was able to whip up a little script that runs on startup. This script waits 5 minutes to allow for my firewall and modem to boot up, then sends a pushover notification to let me know the piKVM is online and what its external IP address is.

To get it working on the piKVM I had to enter into RW mode, write and save the script, add execute permissions to the script, then configure a systemd service to run the script at startup.

Here is the script, saved under /root/boot-pushover.sh

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -eu

#Wait 5 minutes to allow router bootup
sleep 300

TOKEN="PUSHOVER_APPLICATION_TOKEN"
USER="PUSHOVER_USER_TOKEN"
EXTERNAL_IP="$(curl ifconfig.me)"
MESSAGE="$(hostname) is online. External IP: $EXTERNAL_IP"

#Send pushover command to alert it's up and send its external IP
curl -s \
  --form-string "token=$TOKEN" \
  --form-string "user=$USER" \
  --form-string "message=$MESSAGE" \
  https://api.pushover.net/1/messages.json

Set executable: chmod +x /root/boot-pushover.sh

Here is the systemd service, saved under /etc/systemd/system/boot-pushover-notification.service

[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=/root/boot-pushover.sh
RemainAfterExit=yes
User=root
Group=root
RestartSec=15
Restart=on-failure

[Unit]
Wants=network.target
After=network.target nss-lookup.target

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Reload daemons & enable startup:

systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl enable boot-pushover-notification.service

Test by exiting rw mode and rebooting the piKVM:

ro
reboot

It works really well!