PiAware

This is a repackaging of the official FlightAware version of piaware. For the original docs, see README-upstream.md.

This version is based on FlightAware's 1.19-3 release.

Installation

Warning: This package conflicts with the standard piaware package. You must uninstall the standard piaware package before installing piaware-mutability.

The recommended way to install piaware-mutability is from the mutability.co.uk repository.

First, manually install the mutability-repo package if it is not already installed:

$ wget https://github.com/mutability/mutability-repo/releases/download/v0.1.0/mutability-repo_0.1.0_armhf.deb
$ sudo dpkg -i mutability-repo_0.1.0_armhf.deb

Then use apt-get to install piaware-mutability:

$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install piaware-mutability

You probably also want a package that provide a FATSV-format feed. Currently these packages provide one:

faup1090: a FlightAware utility that converts Beast-format data from an existing source into the FATSV format;
dump1090-flightaware: the FlightAware version of dump1090 that directly supports FATSV;
dump1090-mutability: also directly supports FATSV.

Other software such as modesmixer2 will also work (but isn't packaged).

piaware-mutability will be upgraded to new versions automatically when you upgrade other packages:

$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

Changes from upstream

The majority of the changes are policy changes, making different decisions about how piaware should run, log, and affect other parts of the system.

Single-purpose selfcontained packaging

This package is a selfcontained build that can be built with dpkg-buildpackage without a separate external build step.

This package only contains piaware. faup1090 and tcllauncher are not included - they are now part of their own packages: faup1090 is built from dump1090-flightaware and tcllauncher has its own package.

Configuration

The configuration file for piaware now lives at /etc/piaware.adept.conf, not in /root. Settings related to automatic startup of piaware and logging are in /etc/default/piaware-mutability.

Configuration via debconf is also supported (dpkg-reconfigure piaware-mutability)

Security

piaware no longer insists on running as root (in fact, it will refuse to run as root).

As a result of this, piaware cannot directly do system upgrades without explicit sudo configuration. See below.

Changes to how piaware invokes external commands

Upstream piaware would just run commands as root as desired to affect the local system.

This package runs scripts contained in /etc/piaware.hooks/ to run particular tasks. These scripts will run as the piaware user, not root.

In cases where additional privileges are needed, the hook scripts try to invoke the needed commands via sudo.

The hook scripts are intended to be customized as needed if you want them to behave differently, as appropriate for your system.

There is a sample sudoers file provided that enables the commands that the default hook scripts want to run. This file is entirely commented out; you must modify it if you want piaware to have the ability to trigger upgrades etc.

Limiting information that piaware sends to FlightAware

Upstream piaware sends system health information and logging back to the FlightAware servers. This can be useful to FlightAware for monitoring dedicated installations that aren't running anything else and probably won't see any monitoring otherwise, but it is not so appropriate for a shared machine where other things are running and someone is looking after it locally.

This package adds configuration options that allow you to disable the sending of this information.

Building the package

This package is intended to be built using the normal Debian package building tools:

sudo apt-get install build-essential debhelper tcl8.5
dpkg-buildpackage -b      # or debuild, or pdebuild, etc

mutability / piaware