My Story:
As for many others, my interest in tracking flights started out as a "what is it, flying over my head?". After a couple of years subscribing to the Flightradar24 service, I came across the
"Build your own ADS-B receiver" article and decided to order a dongle and antenna.
Being a system operator in a midsize company for many years, I have seen too many problems running long term services on the Raspberry Pi due to malfunctioning SD cards caused by the limited number of write operations allowed on this type of storage. The only right solution for me, was to run the feeder on a virtual Linux on my home VMware server. But soon the struggles began to show, as no-one seems to run ADS-B receivers on anything but ARM platforms. So - For anyone out there wanting to run fr24feed on a 64-bit Intel-based Linux, I have made the compact how-to guide below. It is not meant to be a detailed step-by-step guide with a lot of explanations, but as a quick-guide for the experienced Linux operator needing a hint or two.
My Hardware:
| Receiver |
RTL-SDR R820T2 TCXO Dongle |
| Antenna |
A3 ADS-B Antenna (1090 MHz) |
| Computer |
Intel® NUC Kit NUC6i7KYK (Skull Canyon) |
| Hypervisor |
VMware ESXi 6.7 |
| OS |
Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS Server |
sudo apt install build-essential rtl-sdr librtlsdr-dev pkg-config
wget https://repo-feed.flightradar24.com/rpi_images/fr24-raspberry-pi-latest.img.gz
wget https://repo-feed.flightradar24.com/linux_x86_64_binaries/fr24feed_1.0.18-5_amd64.tgz
git clone https://github.com/mutability/dump1090.git dump1090-1.15
gunzip --keep fr24-raspberry-pi-latest.img.gz
tar xzf fr24feed_1.0.18-5_amd64.tgz
tar xzf dump1090-1.14.tar.gz
cd dump1090-1.15
make
cd ..
== Creating a new fr24 user ==
sudo su
groupadd -g 992 fr24
useradd -g fr24 -u 992 fr24 -d /home/fr24 -s /bin/bash
mkdir /home/fr24
chown fr24:fr24 /home/fr24
chmod 755 /home/fr24
exit
== Installing ==
sudo su
cp ./fr24feed_amd64/fr24feed /usr/bin/fr24feed
cp ./dump1090-1.15/dump1090 /usr/bin/dump1090-mutability
mkdir ./fr24
fdisk --list fr24-raspberry-pi-latest.img
Code:
Disk fr24-raspberry-pi-latest.img: 1.8 GiB, 1866465280 bytes, 3645440 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0xee25660b
Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
fr24-raspberry-pi-latest.img1 8192 97889 89698 43.8M c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
fr24-raspberry-pi-latest.img2 98304 3645439 3547136 1.7G 83 Linux
Multiply the unit size with the starting point of img2 and use it for offset.
mount --options loop,offset=
50331648 fr24-raspberry-pi-latest.img ./fr24
cp ./fr24/etc/fr24feed.ini /etc/fr24feed.ini
cp ./fr24/etc/logrotate.d/fr24feed /etc/logrotate.d/fr24feed
cp ./fr24/etc/systemd/system/fr24feed.service /etc/systemd/system/fr24feed.service
cp ./fr24/etc/udev/rules.d/rtl-sdr.rules /etc/udev/rules.d/rtl-sdr.rules
cp ./fr24/usr/bin/fr24feed-status /usr/bin/fr24feed-status
mkdir -p /usr/lib/fr24/public_html/coolclock
cp -R ./fr24/usr/lib/fr24/* /usr/lib/fr24
mkdir -p /usr/share/fr24/licences
cp -R ./fr24/usr/share/fr24/* /usr/share/fr24
umount ./fr24
exit
== Wrapping it all up ==
sudo fr24feed --signup
<== If you are not already signed up
sudo vi /etc/fr24feed.ini
logpath="/var/log/fr24feed"
fr24key="xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"
sudo vi /etc/systemd/system/fr24feed.service
ExecStartPre=-/usr/lib/fr24/install_dump1090.sh
<== Remove this line (just to be safe)
sudo systemctl enable fr24feed.service
sudo systemctl start fr24feed.service
== Flightradar24 status ==
fr24feed-status
sudo systemctl status fr24feed.service