My Flightradar24 feeder keeps stopping

I booted up the Pi and let it obtain an IP address from router. Then I went into router and set the IP to Reserved up. And that is what the router and Pi continues to use. This router is somewhat different that others I have used in that it uses 192.168.0.X instead of 192.168.1.X as the format…

The strange thing is whatever is happening it doesn’t seem to affect FlightAware… at least not nearly to the degree that it does FR24

The Pi is connected to the 2.4G WiFi and it appears to have good sig level - the Pi is in the basement and router is on first floor. There is only about 30’ separating the devices. Here is the 2.4G setting…

I have the router set to renew lease after 1 week. Originally out of the box the router was set to renew lease every day. I changed to once a week thinking that maybe that was causing a problem…

Next time check if rebooting changes the traceroute.

You could also try the traceroute from another computer.

For comparison you could run a trace for FA as well:

traceroute piaware.flightaware.com

Might be your router is to blame.

Hmm… check this when the issue happens again:

sudo route -n
sudo ip a

 

This is a chronic disease of FR24, and you are not the only one suffering from it. Examples are following two posts. There are lot more similar posts. Run a search in FR24 forums with keywords “irregular feed”, “broken feed”, “stopped feeding” etc etc to find these

 
https://forum.flightradar24.com/forum/radar-forums/flightradar24-feeding-data-to-flightradar24/12406-irregular-feed#post12406

 
https://forum.flightradar24.com/forum/radar-forums/flightradar24-feeding-data-to-flightradar24/12463-email-alert-feature?p=154537#post154537

 

When (if !!!) it happens again, try running tracert from your PC before rebooting the Pi.
Open a command prompt and type

tracert 185.218.24.1

and

tracert piaware.flightaware.com

(note the spelling…tracert)

If as abcd567 noted it’s a chronic disease…then those should run just fine but when you traceroute to FR24 from the Raspberry Pi it will not; it will work tracing to flightaware from the Pi.

Also, you can check to see if the router has somehow lost a connection to the Pi. Should show under connected devices or some other nomenclature within the Router menu. My Spectrum router it shows under Advanced/Connectivity. Probably is connected but doesn’t hurt to check real quick.

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Note that “tracert” is a Windows/PC command. From Mac or Linux, the correct command would be “traceroute”

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Yes !! Thank you that sure looks a lot like what is happening to me…

Thank you all for the replies and great suggestions ! I am not sure where FR24 servers are but corp headquarters is Sweden I believe. I think FA is in Texas - Houston I think.

Tracerts to FR24 and FA both basically go to Chicago then FA goes to Houston and FR24 heads across the pond to Norway/Sweden. Path to Houston isn’t pristine but not too bad. Path across the pond gets more tenuous…

Yes, both the main office (not that it’s getting much use right now!) and the main datacenter are in Houston.

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So my Pi crapped out again. I found out a few things…

  • According to my router it said that the Pi was still connected to it…
  • I could not SSH into the Pi
  • I tried restarting PiAware to no avail…
  • I tried restarting dump 1090 to no avail…
  • To bring the Pi back on line I had to do a restart via the FlightAware gear config…
  • So apparently I could communicate with the Pi via FA via the internet via WiFi…
  • So ???

Sounds like a problem with your local network or router more than anything.

No clue.

Get a new router, reimage the RPi …

You could also not assign a reserved IP on the router, see if it’s an issue with that.

I know its tempting to blame the router but… I just moved to my present location from a different state. So although I still have Spectrum I have different router than I had a couple weeks ago. And… I was having these same problems at my previous location. So maybe that does indicate a problem with SW on the Pi…

if you can reach the Pi via HTTP but not via SSH, that’s either 1 of 2 things… The firewall or DNS.

Check the firewall first. I’m not sure if it’s enabled in the piaware image but you can tell quickly by running…

$ sudo iptables -L -n -v
Chain INPUT (policy ACCEPT 2 packets, 1365 bytes)
 pkts bytes target     prot opt in     out     source               destination         

Chain FORWARD (policy ACCEPT 0 packets, 0 bytes)
 pkts bytes target     prot opt in     out     source               destination         

Chain OUTPUT (policy ACCEPT 2 packets, 1365 bytes)
 pkts bytes target     prot opt in     out     source               destination         

If the result looke like that, then good. It’s not running.

Next check DNS.
HTTP requests generally don’t trigger a reverse DNS lookup on the source IP address, but SSH can. If the DNS is slow, the SSH handshake can time out. I’m also not sure how or whether fr24feed uses DNS or hard codes their feed server IP address. In any case, a few things to check… On your router, make sure it’s giving the clients 2 DNS server addresses… The default is usually the router itself but you should provide a secondary one if you can. This can be one of Spectrum’s public DNS servers or a global one like 8.8.8.8. I’d also open an SSH session while it’s working and leave it open so you can use it if you discover a problem. Also don’t forget, if you have a spare monitor and keyboard, you can always attach them to the Pi.

Here is the result of the $ sudo iptables -L -n -v command…

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo iptables -L -n -v
Chain INPUT (policy ACCEPT 0 packets, 0 bytes)
pkts bytes target prot opt in out source destination

Chain FORWARD (policy ACCEPT 0 packets, 0 bytes)
pkts bytes target prot opt in out source destination

Chain OUTPUT (policy ACCEPT 0 packets, 0 bytes)
pkts bytes target prot opt in out source destination

Regarding DNS… I don’t see anywhere in the router where it talks about DNS except for dynamic DNS and that is disabled. I know in the past I have seen spot to either use the provided DNS or supply one or two.

I had a similar issue after my router blew up and switched to a new one. It turns out that my Pi was fighting with another device for an IP address. I set a static IP on the Pi and the problem went away. Since it was an intermittent issue, it took a few weeks to dawn on me what was going on. Not saying this is what the issue is on your setup, but it’s worth looking into…

Thanks for the suggestion. My rig is using a static IP