The jPC Administration Program

When booting the jPC for the first time, it will boot into the user interface of the jPC administration program.

The administration program provides a much more immediate benefit to users than a desktop:

• It immediately demonstrates that the panel PC is operating correctly.
• It immediately presents information such as IP address, hardware specifications, software specifications, version info, and resource consumption to the operator upon booting.
• It provides fast access to the most common features needed by end users, and production and testing teams.
• It provides demonstration of the jPC's capabilities and the kind of software solutions that can be created for the jPC.
• It is purpose-built for the jPC, so there are no issues such as windows being too large for the LCD to display.

Any features not accessible in the administration program can be accessed via a terminal console.

The administration program is a .NET Blazor Server program bound to port 7080. It needs to run with elevated privileges (i.e. sudo), so it runs as a system service.

To stop and disable the service run

sudo systemctl stop jpc-admin
sudo systemctl disable jpc-admin

By default, once booted, the administration program is displayed in a Chromium kiosk browser window on the local LCD. This is controlled in the ~/autorun/autorun.sh script with the command /opt/ComfileTech/jpc-admin/show_ui.

To prevent the local display from appearing, simply comment out the /opt/ComfileTech/jpc-admin/show_ui in the ~/autorun/autorun.sh script and reboot.

The administration program's user interface can also be displayed remotely, independently of the remote desktop feature, by creating an SSH tunnel to port 7080 and then opening the UI in the client computer's web browser:

1. On the client computer, run ssh -L 7080:localhost:7080 admin@{jpc_ip_address} to authenticate and create the SSH tunnel.
2. Once logged in, open http://localhost:7080 in the client's web browser.

The SSH tunnel has the benefit of utilizing the jPC's existing authentication, authorization, and secure encryption features, so they don't need to be duplicated for the HTTP(S) endpoint.