Some experience to share, Raspberry Pi 2b

[FlyTT14]

Some experience to share after 2 months with my Raspberry Pi2 and a USB RTL-SDR Realtek RTL2832U dongle

First, I have 5 other setup feeding fligt info to FligtAware, PlaneFinder, FlightRadar24, RadarVirtuel and OpenGlider Net and I'm using their "original" setup and config.
I also have a jungle of antennas on my roof :-)

So when RadarBox24 added support for Raspberry I decided to add one more Pi and I have used their installation method from this link: https://www.radarbox24.com/raspberry-pi/guide

The installation was easy no issues but if you take a look at my status page you can see some red areas showing "offline" https://www.radarbox24.com/stations/EXTRPI000142
Well,…. I'm not offline and non other feeders I have show me offline.
Been in contact with support and they say; yes we might have a problem showing offline instead of No Data.
Another problem is that it also goes Offline when there are traffic in the air

So to compensate for this strange behaviour I have added a few CRON jobs to my Pi trying to force the rbfeeder to be online

This is what I have added to CRON
# m h dom mon dow user   command
0  0    * * *   /sbin/reboot
0  6    * * *   systemctl restart rbfeeder
0  9    * * *   systemctl restart rbfeeder
0  12   * * *   /sbin/reboot
0  15   * * *   systemctl restart rbfeeder
0  18   * * *   systemctl restart rbfeeder
0  21   * * *   systemctl restart rbfeeder

This setting force the Pi to boot every 12 hour and restart the rbfeeder every 3 hour just to keep it alive.

Another thing you should be aware of is the log files.
Debending of the size of your SD card you have to keep an eye of the log files in the  /var/log
The rbfeeder writes info to rbfeeder.log and after a month mine was over 25MB, not so big but it writes to the file every 30 seconds.
You will also see lot of records in syslog and daemon.log so keep an eye of the size

--
Lasse

[abcd567]

1) Good idea to add a cron job to keep rbfeeder alive IF it is stopping frequently.

2) Good idea to keep an eye on log file size and delete it if it grows too big. This applies not only to RBFeeder log file, but also to other feeder's log files.

3) I understand from your post that you have one dedicated Pi for each of the sites you feed. I dont understand why. I feed 5 sites from single Pi model2 (Radarbox24, Flightaware, Flightradar24, Planefinder, and Adsbexchange). The load is below 50%, and memory usage 33%. I never faced any problem doing so. Please see screenshot below. Please scroll to Right end of the screenshot to see the feeders.

[FlyTT14]

:-) there no good reason for why....   :-)  I just had them from another project and then when the flight tracking ball started to roll... it was easy to just grab one from the box..
Maybe I'l take another one and try to get them All In One