Both feeders 'dead' this morning

FlightAware ADS-B Flight Tracking
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I have been putting off upgrading my feeders to Buster because of the work involved in reinstating them to how they are now but it looks like I have now choice as neither of them are reporting any aircraft since a reboot this morning.

When I looked at the status of dump1090-fa it shows it is an error state and when I tried to update them, it says there are dependencies that cannot be installed. So it looks like the old software was removed but the update failed so they weren’t restarted as they were running until this morning.

I’ve gone back to a backup from May on new SD cards to get them working and disabled auto-updates while I devise a strategy for upgrading.

My question is this:

Is there a simple way of updating (re-imaging) to Buster and reinstating the feeders and other software that I have been using or do I just have to bite the bullet and work through the configurations manually?

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Updating to a new distribution can be tricky; usually re-imaging with a fresh install of the new version is a simpler path.

There have not been any auto-updates recently AFAIK so whatever broke was something else (but if you’ve reimaged, we’ll never know what exactly)

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Both feeders seem to have the same problem and it must have occurred some time between the 17th of May and the 7th of July. They are on a UPS and haven’t been touched until this morning when, as far as I was aware, they were working fine.

I reimaged from backup onto new SD cards and still have the ones that stopped working so that I have all the configurations available. But I have no idea how to troubleshoot the problem and seems pointless anyway because, as I said, I was intending to install Buster on them (by imaging onto some other new SD cards) at some point but was putting it off because there are five clients, bias-t, graphs, timelapse, polar, RaspiBackup, etc., to install on two devices.

I suppose I’m just being lazy really. I know that many people on here feel that installing a fresh copy of LINUX on an SD card, reinstalling all their software and configurations is a trivial matter, but as a Windows user who is used to carrying over all their data, settings and programs from one version to another by upgrading, it doesn’t seem such a trivial matter to me.

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Takes a moment for sure.
Raspbian Lite: ADS B receiver · wiedehopf/adsb-wiki Wiki · GitHub

But not super long.
Just go for it.

Oh yeah this might apply i suppose: For Beginners - How to Get Back Existing Station Number in A Fresh Install

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Thanks @wiedehopf , the Wiki is useful.

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Re-imaging Made Easy

 

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Thanks @abcd567, that’s helpful as well.

I already have a record of all the required info from the last time I went through the process. Just wasn’t looking forward to going through all the setting up on two devices unless I had to.

The thing that really tripped me up last time was bias-t - even with this https://discussions.flightaware.com/t/rtl-sdr-v3-experiment-to-enable-bias-t/34602 it took me ages to get it to work from start up. I think that was one of the things that was really putting me off.

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That was an experiment. Use following simpler and straight frward method:

https://www.rtl-sdr.com/getting-the-v3-bias-tee-to-activate-on-piaware-ads-b-images/

@wiedehopf
Have you written any script to enable bias-t automatically istead of manual procedure noted above?

 

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My bad. That was the thing i used in the end. I just found it on my NAS.

I’ve also found some stuff to do with bias-t on @wiedehopf 's github presence.

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RTL Bias Tee · wiedehopf/adsb-wiki Wiki · GitHub

It’s really easy with that, i thought it was linked from the guide i put before.

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Thanks @wiedehopf.

I think I may have asked this before - is there a way to recover the data for Graphs1090? Can I just restore the rrd files from the old SD card, or is it not that simple?

edit: sorry, should have searched first and would have found this: https://discussions.flightaware.com/t/merging-old-graphs1090-data/77359

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GitHub - wiedehopf/graphs1090: Graphs for readsb / dump1090-fa / dump1090 (based on dump1090-tools by mutability)

You don’t need to merge old data … just follow what it says on the github page for backup and restore.
Merge implies you have 2 data sets you want to merge, you don’t.

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Actually, I do have old data that I would like to merge but that is another issue.

edit: you are correct, bias-t info is linked in the stuff you provided. I managed to merge my old data using a method based on the instructions on the github page. It worked a treat.

Thanks @wiedehopf.

edit: I haven’t managed to read all the stuff about everything I need to do but what I have read so far is very good indeed.

Thanks guys.

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Yeah, feeders mostly done now. Just a few bits and pieces that aren’t so important to do.

As you say - it isn’t that hard - especially now with all the scripts that @wiedehopf provides.

Fear of the unknown I guess.

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