I made it this long so it is probably safe to count my eggs before they hatch. It looks I I have just 4 more days to go until my feeding streak reaches the 2 year mark. I am curious how many people have made it this far or are also approaching this point.
In case anyone is interested, I am still running a RPi B+ over Wi-Fi. Other than a periodic software update, I have not needed to interact with the device in well over a year and a half. I have a few daemons to help keep it in good health. For example, it reboots if it has been unable to ping the router in the past 5 minutes, it reboots if the processing load exceeds some threshold (ie it is nearly locked up), and it reboots nightly when the activity level is low.
My device is in the attic, which gets pretty hot in the summer so I think it will probably die once my SD card finally gets corrupted due to the heat. I have been considering writing a daemon to read the entire contents of the card every 3 months (using “dd if=/dev/mmcblk0 of=/dev/null”) to guard against the corruption. This works because SD cards can detect corruption during reads, if the correction is small enough, it is corrected and written back to a different location on the card the next time another write takes place. The problem is, some areas of flash rarely get read. If they dont get read for a while then they could become more corrupt with heat and time and eventually reach the point where they are no longer correctable. When you eventually do read those locations you have problems. Ironically, I probably just spent more time describing the problem than it would have taken me to write the daemon!
Mine are both at around 670 days, but both are like the tale of my grandfather’s axe – yeah, it was my grandfather’s axe, well, but the handle has been replaced a few times, and so has the blade…
I’ve swapped out hardware a number of times, well planned and keeping (some might say forging) the same MAC address to keep the streaks going. The RF chains have also undergone quite an evolution, and became much simpler with the arrival of FlightAware’s filters and SDR.
As I’ve mentioned on other threads, I treat these like production systems. That means little to no modification, and not running non-production software. So no games, development work, or other screwing around. Updates for security, of course, and performance.
As with all of my active Pi systems, they do compressed tar backups to the server in the closet twice a week. I’ve had to recover an SD card once, and that was due to a power failure.
The 3.03 branch of things is much better on SD cards, as it keeps a lot of the active stuff in tmpfs (ram).
644 days for my first receiver. Only 88 days for my second. The second is significantly better than the first, so, although it is listed as secondary, it’s really my primary receiver. The rich get richer, of course. Because it was better, it gets the high position on the mast. The older one is stuck in the attic.
613 days for me. Running a B+ since Christmas day 2014. Only changes since day one are the software updates and I’ve also added the Flight Aware antenna (mounted outside) and pro stick this year, which made a huge difference.
Can you please share those daemons.?.
Yesterday I had to manualy reboot my Pi because it hang (processor load/memory limit reached ?? dont know)… but I was thinking of a script to reboot it automatically in those cases…
Managed to keep mine up and running for a while now - 834 days - despite several storm related electrical outages, and another case of storm damage to the phone/DSL line that provides my internet.
Got to be thankful for the utility workers for quickly repairing the wiring - above ground and 1 case of damaged underground wire - that was damaged by some severe storms : lightning strikes and wind gusts.
Data Feed: Live - less than a minute ago
Feeder Check-in: Live - less than a minute ago
Joined: 09-May-2014
Longest Streak: 834 days (19-May-2014 - Today)
Here are links to daemons that I run to keep my pi from getting locked up. I also have a cron job that reboots every morning at around 2AM. This cron job is not necessary but it should reset the system and reduce the number of reboots necessary during the day (when a reboot is more costly).
Does anyone know how the longest streak is calculated? My PiAware has been running since I set it up (about 550 days) but a few days ago something must have gone wrong with dump1090 because, while it was still active and updating to FlightAware, it apparently wasn’t feeding any data, so now my longest streak stops a few days ago. ARGGHHH!!!
The really annoying thing is that I’ve had occasional multi-hour power outages that weren’t recorded as an interruption to the longest streak, but now some dump1090 glitch has caused a break even though everything else was running fine.
These links are truncated, can we get some updated versions please?
I’m also very interested in what k6rtm says about running compressed tar backups to the server in the closet twice a week. as I’d like to do similar here.
73 Keith.
/edit - Found them. The first one is here and the second is here
Come close couple times but thankfully my local electric supplier is top notch and I haven not had nay major failures. I would imagine a good power supply, and active cooling helps out too. Now if I could just upgrade the antenna
And here I thought I had a good streak going on, LOL. Today is 458 days and still going. . Thats a cakewalk to everyone’s, lol. Many kudos to everyone for their streaks!
Question: Any tips on keeping it maintenanced to last that long?
I keep it running 24/7 and the only job it has really is Piaware. Nothing else. I SSH into it every so often to update stuff otherwise I leave it alone. Having it on a UPS help although my local power company is just amazing to be honest. I do not know if it helps but I do have a case with a fan that blows air into it all the time and only this year did I adhere some heat sinks to the chips.
Also, tomorrow I shall be hitting my 1000 day stretch finally!
My streak strategy is similar to Foxinthehouse1. The RasPI is an OLD OLD one has light duty; basically running PiAware and a simple temperature logger that I wrote. A few other tips:
use a good stable UPS power source. Avoid the cheapies.
connect straight to the router (not WiFi) is possible.
once the RasPI is stable, leave it alone.
once the RasPI is stable, make an image backup of the SD card so when it goes out you can recover fast.
My RasPI has been running awhile. I was a PiAware early adopter. My streak was ended by a router going down while I was out of town. All this is really a testament to RasPI HW and the FlightAware SW and support team.
