Announcing the release of PiAware 6

FlightAware ADS-B Flight Tracking
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How-to: Switch to the PiAware v6 SD Card Image Without Losing Your Account Feeder Stats

Somewhere along the line in the last six years, We’ve switched from MAC based feeders to GUID based IDs in the config file. You’ll need to manually set this in piaware-config if you want to maintain your feed stats and not start over as new. You’ll know this is the case if after adoption on the success web page you see something like this, (real values retracted for this reply).

1. Site xxxxx PiAware (SD Card) 6.0 claimed just now! (xx.xx.xx.xx/xx.xx.xx.xx)
2. Site xxxxx: PiAware (SD Card) 6.0 added Friday, September 3, 2021 (xx.xx.xx.xx/xx.xx.xx.xx)
3. Site {`YourOldAwesomeFeederUID`}: PiAware (Debian Package Add-on) 3.7 added Saturday, October 22, 2016 (xx.xx.xx.xx/xx.xx.xx.xx)

Lines #1 & #2 above are an examples of me assuming flightaware.com magically knows what to to after re-flashing SDs and associating now “new” installs. Line #3 has the real payload- the GUID of my original, established feeder. That’s the one with years of stats I wanted to keep.

Grab your established feeder account GUID from the adoptions results as above or anytime you need it from the feeder stats details page of your established feeder in your flightaware.com account. It will be in this format:

12345678-1234-1234-1234-123456789

Note: You’ll need this any time you re-flash your SD card and to repeat the steps below to maintain your feed statistics.

Next, there are two ways to use that value to get your new Pi feeding again. You can set it in the /boot partition of the SD card before installing in in your Raspberry Pi, or you can set it over SSH while PiAware is running.

Easy Option One: Configure on your PC

  1. Connect your PiAware SD card to your PC, and open the piaware-config.txt file
  2. Configure the line feeder-id to include the GUID of your established feeder in a line below the Additional settings line. Add the feeder-id line if it’s not there:
# Additional settings can be added below.

feeder-id {your established feeder's GUID}
  1. Save your edits, install the SD card in your PI, and you should be good to go.

Easy-ish Option Two: Configure on your PIAware via SSH

For this one you’ll need to enable SSH access on the Pi by adding an empty file named ssh in the /boot partition of your SD card. But to do that, you might as well use the “Easy Option One” method, since you could simply edit the piaware-config.txt file anyway at the same time. Also if you enable SSH, you should log in and change the default pi user’s password because “pi” “flightaware” is a well known user default that attackers might scan for.

  1. Enable SSH as described here: flightaware.com/adsb/piaware/build/optional
  2. Boot your PiAware and let it come up on your network
  3. Open an SSH session to your PiAware from a terminal on your PC with the command
> ssh pi@{your PiAware's IP}
  1. Log in to the Pi and use the piaware-config command, replacing this example feeder GUID with your desired feeder ID
$ piaware-config feeder-id {your established feeder GUID}
  1. Confirm the change in the config file:
$ cat /boot/piaware-config.txt

You’ll see that the line has been updated and a comment added to indicate the change came from piaware-config.

# Additional settings can be added below.
 
feeder-id {your feeder ID}   # updated by fa_piaware_config
  1. Restart PiWare and then confirm your feeder is working again on your flightaware.com profile page. It may take a couple of minutes to show up.
$ piaware-config -restart

Last, once you have your new image feeding to your original account, wait 48 hours then cleanup your accidentally created and now dead feeders from the flightaware.com page for your account as described here: flightaware.com/adsb/faq/#removesite

Hope that helps!

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