dump1090 not starting on boot [SOLVED]

I looked around the forum and didn’t see this specific issue. I’ve already solved it, so here’s a problem and solution all in one post.

I noticed that dump1090 wasn’t auto starting on a new raspberry pi installation (raspbian, not the FlightAware distro). I had to login and stop then start fadump1090.sh (or run restart). The piaware daemon was running as expected, just the dump1090 process was missing. I had an ethernet connected pi that worked, and a wifi connected pi that wasn’t working. Nothing in the logs indicated an issue with dump1090 starting and it even appeared to have a proper pid file (no actual process though).

After thinking about it for a bit, I noticed that wlan0 was coming up after the system attempted to start dump1090. I realized that dump1090 needs to bind to an interface to listen for piaware connections and the wireless not being connected yet may have been causing issues… I was able to fix it by editing the file “/etc/init.d/fadump1090.sh” to specify $network as a prerequisite.

From the header of fadump1090.sh change:


# Required-Start:	$remote_fs
# Required-Stop:	$remote_fs

To be:


# Required-Start:	$network $remote_fs
# Required-Stop:	$network $remote_fs

The above changes the boot daemon order so that the network interface comes up before dump1090 starts. As a result dump1090 is starting properly again. I think this should be added to the package distributed by FlightAware.

You can open an issue over at https://github.com/flightaware/dump1090 if you think it would help others…

Hmm, it’s not clear where exactly fadump1090.sh is coming from though. It’s not a part of that repository. I see it in other repositories, but not somewhere linked to what’s installed by following the instructions here:
flightaware.com/adsb/piaware/install

I must be missing something.

github.com/flightaware/dump1090 … 90.sh.init

This is all changing soon anyway.

Thanks for the link. I’m holding off on reporting it