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Comment by cozzyd

19 hours ago

Yeah I definitely don't want to run an opaque container either. We're already collecting and storing the data... I am happy to throw the data over via a udp socket or http request, but I don't want random software that we don't control running...

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cozzyd

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wiedehopf  10 hours ago

If you're not comfortable running my readsb (fork of dump1090) which is the feed client used by live / lol / fi and some other sites, then you can probably just send them data using socat.

Most of them will have port 30004 open for their ingest domain, usually feed.domain.com. Thus you'd hook up socat to 127.0.0.1:30005 (i assume you run dump1090 or readsb locally as a decoder). And make socat send that to feed.adsb.lol:30004 and/or feed.airplanes.live:30004

If you're in a remote location, you don't need to worry about mlat-client as MLAT requires at least 4 receivers that receive common aircraft.

  • mcpherrinm  8 hours ago

    Is there a good documentation (or maybe code) reference to the protocols that get used here? Running readsb is fine enough by me, but I'm just interested in how these systems work. I see some mentions of a Beast format. And then there's the mlat-client too

  • cozzyd  10 hours ago

    Thanks! After doing some more digging I suspected something like this was the simplest solution! Thanks for confirming.

    • cozzyd  7 hours ago

      And to be clear, I'm not necessarily against running readsb I just don't want to run random bash scripts that mess with a running system...

      It looks like readsb is an evolution of dump1090 with potentially more features? I'll look into it when we consider reworking our software. For now I added a quick socat and I'll find out soon if it worked (no planes currently over Summit...). It would be nice if these websites advertised "Start feeding from your running dump1090 instance with socat tcp:localhost:30005 tcp:foo.bar:30004, here is a systemd service that does that."

      edit: it worked! airplanes.live now tracking QTR28V from Seattle to Doha.

      But to conserve bandwidth, it might make sense to send through a compressed ssh tunnel to something not in the middle of the Greenland ice sheet.