I’ve finished repackaging piaware 1.19-3 with my own policy changes.
If you’re happy with FlightAware’s 1.19-3 release then there’s no real reason to use this.
It is mostly aimed at those who want to make different policy decisions about how piaware behaves.
TL;DR
$ wget https://github.com/mutability/mutability-repo/releases/download/v0.1.0/mutability-repo_0.1.0_armhf.deb
$ sudo dpkg -i mutability-repo_0.1.0_armhf.deb
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get remove piaware # sorry, it's awkward to make the two versions coexist
$ sudo apt-get install piaware-mutability
$ sudo apt-get install dump1090-flightaware # or dump1090-mutability, or faup1090
$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure piaware-mutability
Changes
The changes in this package are all about security / admin / privacy policy decisions, where I’ve wanted to do something different to what FlightAware’s package provided.
There were a couple of bugfixes and some code rearrangement needed along the way, but this version has fundamentally the same features as FlightAware’s version, just configured differently.
In summary this is what is done differently:
piaware runs as an unprivileged user, not as root
piaware can be configured via debconf / dpkg-reconfigure
config files live in /etc, not in /root
log files live in /var/log, not in /tmp
log rotation is done by logrotate, not by piaware itself
external commands that piaware wants to run, e.g. “restart dump1090” or “start faup1090” or “upgrade system packages”, are delegated to user-editable shellscripts in /etc/piaware.hooks
the default hooks will gain root access via sudo, if permitted, for the specific commands they need to run
there’s a sudo configuration provided that has the necessary commands (all commented out by default)
sending of system health information (CPU temperature etc) to FlightAware can be disabled
echoing of log messages to FlightAware can be disabled
It only contains the piaware package itself to install onto an existing system, it’s not a full system image. lighttpd is available as a standard raspbian package.
To reiterate: this is a piaware package. Not dump1090, not faup1090, not lighttpd, not a sdcard image. It has piaware, piaware-config, piaware-status, and scripts to support it. It is one part of a larger system, you will need other parts to make it useful. It’s designed to be installed in addition to the dump1090-mutability package etc.
For example I install the piaware-mutability, dump1090-mutability, and lighttpd packages (+ dependencies that are autoinstalled) on my receivers.
Released piaware-mutability 1.20-1mu-1 (Raspbian + Ubuntu packages in the usual places)
This is mostly just a version bump to 1.20 to make the flightaware control panel happy.
Recommended upgrade path is to apt-get update / apt-get upgrade from a shell.
From upstream: Have piaware exit if not killed by a restart
Always log to stdout (redirected by the init.d script to the right place), never to /tmp, to reduce confusion when migrating from FlightAware piaware.
Various tweaks to try to get control-panel-driven upgrades working
I tried to move to ppa:ojowett/dump1090 using the debs dump1090-mutability and piaware-mutability. I wanted to make this move due to the nicer debian/ubuntu integration including logging and the more informative json output.
However I get the following error from flightaware status:
Feeder Type: PiAware 1.20-1mu-1ubuntu1
Multilateration (MLAT): PiAware v1.20-1mu-1ubuntu1 Not Supported (Minimum v2.0)
piaware-mutability hasn’t really had much attention recently. I’d go with the standard piaware if you can. I am slowly integrating the -mutability changes back into the main package when I can.
Thanks for the recommendation. I’ll stick with the standard piaware package for now then. The change I’d really like to see in the main version is the logging to /var/log with logrotate doing the rotation.
Is there any reason to not stick with the dump1090-mutability package?
