Cast dashboard on old iPads [iHost]

Ideas & Suggestion
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1

I want to share with the community a useful way to resume an old iPad as a Cast display.
In my house I’ve an old iPad 2 and a iPad mini 2, both stuck with iOS 9.x.

Safari is too old to run the Cast dashboard but I’ve found a trick.

You can install a docker named jlesage/firefox on your iHost that will run a new version of Firefox on the iHost itself. It’ll be exposed through a VNC connection to your old browser and this seems to work quite good.

I’ll share my env variables:

FF_KIOSK=1 (to make Firefox fullscreen)
DARK_MODE=1 (my preferred mode :slight_smile:)
KEEP_APP_RUNNING=1 (to restart Firefox in case of an unexpected crash)
LANG=it_IT.UTF-8 (my native language)
FF_OPEN_URL=http://172.16.0.126/cast/ (the address of my ihost cast dashboard)

You should also connect a volume to persist browser cache and expose port 5800 et voilà: you can now address your iHost IP address with port 5800 and use your cast dashboard on an old iPad!

I hope this will be useful for someone of you.

You can find more documentation of the docker here: GitHub - jlesage/docker-firefox: Docker container for Firefox

Best

2

Seems awsome, will try later.

I have installed the addon tailscale to access my iHost remotely and using Full kiosk to display my iHost CAST dashboard in full screen. :grinning:

3

Hey, do you mind sharing more details about your setup? I wan’t to do something similar.

4

Check out Fully Kiosk

5

This arrangement seems to use a high % of the iHost CPU capacity when it is dealing with activity and the browser connected to it seems to be slow. You could actually use this to expose port 5800 to the internet for remote access to the CAST GUI but I have not been successful in getting it to work securely with CONNECTION_SECURITY=1, WEB_AUTHENTICATION = 1, WEB_AUTHENTICATION_USERNAME = xxxxxx, WEB_AUTHENTICATION_PASSWORD = yyyyyy.