PiAware goes down daily for me

My setup is an old Raspberry PI B with NooElec SDR on an external USB hub. This appears to go down daily (the webpage with the little planes doesn’t come up), what logs should I look at first? The PI itself doesn’t go down I can still SSH to it. Rebooting brings it back up for less than a day now. :unamused:

/tmp/piaware.out has the piaware logs.

If I had to guess without more information, I’d say that the dongle is getting wedged.

My first dongle died after about 18 months use - it started drawing more power and overheating (could have been the other way about) - can also be Power supply related.

Check if the red light is blinking on the RPi if it is get a better power supply or move the dongle to a powered USB hub.

I am using a powered USB hub (which also gives backup power to the PI too). The PI red light is not blinking and it also has its own power supply. Here is what I see in my piaware.out log when the issue starts.

pi@raspberrypib /tmp $ tail piaware.out
11/06/2015 16:05:08 34630 msgs recv’d from dump1090 (411 in last 5m); 34630 msgs sent to FlightAware
11/06/2015 16:10:08 34999 msgs recv’d from dump1090 (369 in last 5m); 34999 msgs sent to FlightAware
11/06/2015 16:15:08 35203 msgs recv’d from dump1090 (204 in last 5m); 35203 msgs sent to FlightAware
11/06/2015 16:20:08 35310 msgs recv’d from dump1090 (107 in last 5m); 35310 msgs sent to FlightAware
11/06/2015 16:25:08 35310 msgs recv’d from dump1090 (0 in last 5m); 35310 msgs sent to FlightAware
11/06/2015 16:30:08 35310 msgs recv’d from dump1090 (0 in last 5m); 35310 msgs sent to FlightAware
11/06/2015 16:35:08 35310 msgs recv’d from dump1090 (0 in last 5m); 35310 msgs sent to FlightAware
11/06/2015 16:40:08 35310 msgs recv’d from dump1090 (0 in last 5m); 35310 msgs sent to FlightAware
11/06/2015 16:45:08 35310 msgs recv’d from dump1090 (0 in last 5m); 35310 msgs sent to FlightAware
11/06/2015 16:50:08 35310 msgs recv’d from dump1090 (0 in last 5m); 35310 msgs sent to FlightAware
pi@raspberrypib /tmp $

Right, so dump1090 just stops feeding data (but is still running).

If you leave it for a while, piaware will try to restart dump1090 if it sees no traffic for an extended period; but if it is a dongle problem then restarting dump1090 probably doesn’t solve it, it needs a powercycle.

You may want to check “dmesg” output for USB problems too.

Removing the cheap powered USB hub seems to have helped, its stable enough now that a once a day reboot keeps it going

If your Pi is an old version with poly fuses, maybe this mod will help?

blog.yarda.eu/2013/07/hw-mod-inc … berry.html

Nigel.

Sometimes I have the issue where dump1090 barfs and closes its ports, but keeps running. Piaware notices the lost connection and tries to start dump1090, but fails (I guess because zombie dump1090 is still running).

Restarting dump1090 works. So I changed the line in faup1090 where it tries to fix a lost connection to dump1090 from “start” to “restart”, and now it is able to recover on its own.

github.com/flightaware/piaware/ … 90.tcl#L80

I just put in a cron to restart it every 3 hours. I still get the occasional blip - is there any harm in restarting it hourly?

That failure mode of dump1090 sounds like what happens when librtlsdr wedges during exit; that can happen if you have USB problems.