How PiAware feeders are identified (updated 2017/07/16)

Oliver

Is there a timeframe for the ability to take a site like mine and transition it away from the MAC based identification? I’d love to keep my site id and stats but run my new hardware.

It is on my to-do list but it has not been scheduled yet

Understood. I’ll wait to standup the hardware.

abcd567

thanks, worked for me, I have recently purchased an orange dongle and intial testing shows an increase of 50% aircraft and 3 times increase in position reports. Range increased from about 140NM to 210NM. I then had CPU very high so had to update the hardware to an RPi 2.

I have upgraded to dump1090-mutability for the statistics which helped me set the gain in the orange dongle.

Just need to remember not to use the old one on the ethernet port until we get a migration solution. I will tape over the port :smiley:

Roger

When I set my PI up the SD card I had wouldn’t load the image for some reason so I ended up installing in on a 4gb card. I just did this about a week ago.

I ordered a 32 gb card and reinstalled the image and figured out how to enable SSH. I put he card in and I had no location on the Skyview Page and my Stats pages showed no update. I figured this feeder id out and took the SD card pack out and opened the config file. All the way at the bottom I just put in feeder id alkjadsfkjasdfkj122(but my real site id). All seems to be working now. Is that all I need to do?

Hey Oliver -

Any word on converting MAC based installations to ID based installations?

Jim

I have changed hardware on my site, I would like to keep the old site ID, Im using the same image (different SD-card, but I have made sure it has the old sites ID now)

Could you please remove site 43294 and make sure that site 19882 identifies by ID instead of MAC?

Edit:
I didnt want to loose my “longest streak” (from the first day I started with this) on 19882, so I did as GeorgLichtblau and many others, i spoofed the MAC from the old Pi. But I still hope to be able to identify 19882 by ID instead of MAC in the future. It would make it easier when changing out hardware.

I’ve changed hardware at one of my receivers (registered before the feeder-id) today…

As I wanted to keep my old stats I changed the mac-address to the old one and fiddling around for two hours with just creating new feeder-ids :slight_smile:

So the quick and very, very dirty hack to get it to work by just using the mac-address was:

rm /var/cache/piaware/feeder_id
touch /var/cache/piaware/feeder_id
chmod 000 /var/cache/piaware/feeder_id

As said… very, very dirty… but it works :slight_smile:

That will break in the near future.

The Piaware of a new Pi with new image obtains a new feeder-id immediately at FIRST BOOT, if:

(1) Mac address spoof was not done BEFORE FIRST BOOT
OR
(2) Mac address spoof was done, but it did not work due to line break in file cmdline.txt

The trouble free way to spoof mac address is to do it BEFORE FIRST BOOT of the newly written image, and to ensure there is no line break in file cmdline.txt.

After writing the image, and while the microSD card is still in card reader of Laptop/Desktop, click on the drive letter of microSD card. This will open the /boot folder (the only folder visible in laptop/desktop). Then open the file cmdline.txt using Wordpad (do not use Notepad, as it creates a line break in the file when it is saved, and because of line break, the mac spoof does not work).
This file has only one line. At the end of this line, add (without line break) following and save file.

smsc95xx.macaddr=xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
(replace xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx by mac address of old Pi)

Now take out card from laptop/desktop, plugin into Pi and do the FIRST BOOT.

If a line break was introduced, then even if you edit file cmdline.txt in nano editor in SSH console and remove the line break, Piaware by that time has already obtained a new 128 bit site identifier, and you will be faced with problem of getting rid of it.

To enable SSH, you will also need to create a new file SSH in /boot folder BEFORE FIRST BOOT, while the microSD card is still in card reader of laptop/desktop.

A couple of weeks ago, I made a complete set (Pi/dongle/antenna) as a test for a friend so initially I registered it as a second feeder under my own account.
My friend has now decided to keep the set and continue as an independant feeder, how do I proceed to convert my second feeder into an independant one? (it’s already the version with a unique identifier)

If you stop piaware, remove /var/cache/piaware/feeder_id, and restart piaware, then it will create a new site when it logs in and your friend can claim that site for themselves.

Unfortunately the same feeder_id is created the moment I restart piaware, this is what I do:
sudo systemctl stop piaware
piaware-status (to check that piaware has been stopped)
sudo rm feeder_id (when in the /var/cache folder)
ls (to check the file has gone)
sudo systemctl restart piaware
piaware-status (to check that piaware has been started again)

I also tried to reboot the pi (sudo reboot) just after having deleted the feeder_id but alas, to no avail…

Wrong directory.

edit: I looked at the logs and your piaware is providing the same feeder ID as configured data. That means either you configured it explicitly in piaware-config.txt or you’ve done something to make /var/cache/piaware/feeder_id unwriteable by piaware (piaware treats both cases the same - as a configured feeder ID that it can’t update)

Your hint does ring a bell. Originally I configured the Pi at my home but at my friends place it kept rebooting because the AC adapter that he used couldn’t deliver enough current. Once this was solved I had to reimage the Pi due to a crashed µSD-card but this created a third account which I solved by including the original ID in the config file. I guess the problem will be solved by removing this entry and going through the same procedure as mentioned above.

Can you change MAC: b8:27:eb:e9:b1:79 to the newer Unique Identifier?

Hi all, I performed an update on my piaware last night via the site and then rebooted. After the reboot, Piaware came back up with a completely new ID and a new nearest airport an hour and a half away from me. I need to get it back to the original ID. Is there a procedure online to do this?

Thanks!

Looks like this will be a bigger issue as people update their Pi’s. I updated mine last night as well.

I think the Big Fix would be that Flight Aware generate the “Unique Identifier” for all Sites that don’t have one now. That would allow us to move our updated pi-aware back to the old site.

That is the plan.

An old station is identified by mac address, and there is no 128 bit id (long id xxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx) mentioned on the FA stats page.

However I noted that a 128 bit feeder id is assigned and saved in RPi
pi@piaware:~$ cat /var/cache/piaware/feeder_id
895008aa-1434-4084-4c91-f3dc0abe0e14

I checked other two places

pi@piaware:~$ cat /boot/piaware-config.txt
#no feeder-id found
pi@piaware:~$ sudo piaware-config -show feeder-id
#no feeder-id displayed

I deleted the cache file, and rebooted
pi@piaware:~$ sudo rm /var/cache/piaware/feeder_id
pi@piaware:~$ sudo reboot

Now checked, found a new feeder id is assigned
pi@piaware:~$ cat /var/cache/piaware/feeder_id
837dde67-e5f8-4bbe-8c1f-de874b993f64

I repeted “delete cache file and reboot”, yet another new id was assigned.

The station number did not change by this “feeder-id deleting/new feeder-id creation” game.

What is the purpose of this feeder-id, and why a new one is assigned on deleting current feeder-id?

I also found that old sites are still behaving as before to the mac address spoof. When I spoofed mac address, a new site # was alloted, and the pi started feeding it. When I removed the mac address spoof, the pi started feeding the old site.