How can I find the software/service that is reading from the Bluetooth device

I have a VM that’s using my Intel NUC Bluetooth. But I don’t remember how I set this VM up. If it weren’t for the fact that I know a program is getting information from /opt/bluetooth/c0:B6:F9:8D:A6:75 I wouldn’t know that Bluetooth was even working in the first place.

Additionally dmesg | grep blue -i returns the following, so I know it’s configured somehow:

[   25.470189] Bluetooth: Core ver 2.22
[   25.470221] Bluetooth: HCI device and connection manager initialized
[   25.470229] Bluetooth: HCI socket layer initialized
[   25.470234] Bluetooth: L2CAP socket layer initialized
[   25.470241] Bluetooth: SCO socket layer initialized
[   25.613169] Bluetooth: hci0: Firmware revision 0.1 build 197 week 12 2021
[  801.994803] Bluetooth: hci0: advertising data len corrected

I’m trying to setup a new VM that will also use Bluetooth. Yes, I’m turning off the “working” VM so it won’t interfere with the new one. But on my new VM I don’t have a /opt/bluetooth directory, probably because I don’t have something installed/configured correctly.

What can I do on the working VM to determine what I might need to install on the new one? I’ve tried running various BT utilities, like hcitool but none of them are installed. Something has to be reading this. How can I find out what it is so I can setup the new VM with it?

Your answer is likely to be found in /opt/bluetooth/. I would expect a readme.txt and/or install.txt in that directory with a link to where the original source is stored and how you install this software.

/opt/bluetooth means you installed 3rd party software from source. At least... if you followed the (not so official :) ) guidelines.

This tends to come with 2 methods:

1. you copy an executable from /opt/bluetooth to a directory on the system, then add this to a crontab (crontab -l as user or as root or more /etc/crontab)

or

2. in /opt/bluetooth there is a file ending on .service that you start. I would assume anyone would call it bluetooth.service and if that is the case this would tell you if it is active:

   systemctl status bluetooth.service