Fix Kodi Maintenance Tool My IP Address Feature

The Kodi Maintenance Tool is a plugin that provides lots of useful features within one of the World’s most popular media centre systems. Details on the plugin and instructions for installing it can be found on the developers site tvaddons.ag :

https://www.tvaddons.ag/maintenance-tool-kodi/

I recently installed it on my Raspberry Pi 3 based system but discovered that the “What’s my IP address” feature didn’t work. I needed to use this to check my VPN connection was working.

It appeared that the plugin was calling a webpage from iplocation.net and then extracting the IP address and location details. The layout of this page had obviously changed and the plugin was unable to filter the result. I’m not sure why this has been broken for so long as it is really easy to fix.

I didn’t care about geographic location information so I simplified the solution to just give me the external IP address. To do this I used the service provided by ipify.org. They just give you the plain IP address.

Fixing “My IP Address”

On the Raspberry Pi fixing this utility is fairly easy and only takes a few minutes. The plugins are generally written in Python and once you’ve found the correct folder they can be edited with a text editor.

Step 1 – Connect and Browse

Connect to your Pi using SSH using a utility such as Putty or MobaXterm.

Browse to the Maintenance tool directory using :

cd /home/osmc/.kodi/addons/plugin.video.xbmchubmaintenance/

I was using the OSMC distribution but the location on other distributions should be similar. In OpenElec the location is : /storage/.xbmc/addons/plugin.video.xbmchubmaintenance/.

Step 2 – Edit default.py

Edit the default.py file using :

nano default.py

Find the following function definition :

################################
###          My IP           ###
################################
def MYIP(url='http://www.iplocation.net/',inc=1):
....
################################
###        End My IP         ###
################################

replace with :

################################
###          My IP           ###
################################
def MYIP(url='https://api.ipify.org/'):
    ip = net.http_GET(url).content
    dialog=xbmcgui.Dialog()
    dialog.ok(AddonTitle,"[B][COLOR gold]Your IP Address is: [/COLOR][/B] %s" % ip)
################################
###        End My IP         ###
################################

As with all Python make sure you get the indentation correct.

Step 3 – Save and Exit

Use [CTRL-X], then [Y], then [ENTER] to save the text file and quit the nano editor. Obviously you can use various other techniques for editing this file so feel free to use an alternative.

If you typed the function correctly the “My IP Address” option should now present you with a pop-up window showing your external IP address.