install.md

doc > Installation

This system consists of two elements: station (which is intended to run on a Raspberry Pi with an SDR dongle, but can be run on any Linux box) and a server (which is intended to be run in a place with good uplink connectivity). If you are interested in running your own station, you most likely want to deploy just the station and use existing server. Please contact someone from the Svarog team and we'll hook you up.

Station installation

You need to install Rasbian on your Raspberry Pi. Please follow any Raspbian installation instruction, such as this one. Once done, connect to your Pi and do the following as root:

1. Install necessary dependencies:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install python3-minimal git rtl-sdr airspy sox imagemagick

Also, the following tools are needed:

1. noaa-apt - download Raspberry Pi binaries from https://noaa-apt.mbernardi.com.ar/download.html
2. medet - https://github.com/artlav/meteor_decoder, binaries available from: http://orbides.org/page.php?id=1023
3. meteor-demod - https://github.com/dbdexter-dev/meteor_demod

2. Create svarog user (optional):

# useradd svarog

3. Switch to the svarog user (optional):

su - svarog

4. Get the latest svarog code. This and following steps should be done as the user you want to run the process:

git clone https://github.com/gut-space/svarog

5. Install python dependencies:

cd svarog/station
pip3 install --upgrade pip
pip3 install -r requirements.txt
python3 setup.py --skip-python

This step will install necessary dependencies. Alternatively, you skip the install -r requirements.txt and do python3 setup.py install instead, but it will only work in virtual environment.

If you encounter an error similar to this when running the station command:

ImportError: libcblas.so.3: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

You may want to also install libatlas3-base with the following command:

sudo apt install libatlas3-base

One of the useful setup actions conducted is defining a convenience alias. Instead of typing python3 station/cli.py every time, you can simply type station instead.

6. Station management

There is a command line tool used to manage the station. You can run it with:

$ station
usage: svarog [-h] {clear,logs,plan,pass,config,metadata} ...

positional arguments:
  {clear,logs,plan,pass,config,metadata}
                        commands
    clear               Clear all scheduled reception events
    logs                Show logs
    plan                Schedule planned reception events
    pass                Information about passes
    config              Configuration
    metadata            Displays metadata

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit

You can use it to inspect your configuration, clear or schedule upcoming transmissions.

7. Tweak your config.

Run the cli command first:

station

It will create a tempate config for you. The config file is stored in ~/.config/svarog/config.yml. The recommended way of tweaking it is to use the cli.py command itself. For example, to set up your location, you can do:

station config location -lat 54.34 -lng 23.23 -ele 154

In particular, you may want to increase logging level to debug, to spot any problems:

station config logging --level DEBUG

Once your station operates smoothly, you may trim this down to INFO, WARNING or even ERROR.

8. Schedule observations

Once your station coordinates are set, you can tell Svarog to schedule observations:

station plan --force

This should be done once. CLI will update the crontab jobs and will periodically (at 4am each day) add new ones. The --force command will conduct the scheduling now, rather than wait for 4am to do scheduling.

NOTE: If you installed the tools being used (noaa-apt, medet, meteor-demod) in non-standard locations, please make sure the PATH is set in the crontab. You can set it by using crontab -e command and adding a line PATH=.... See this nice explanation: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10129381/crontab-path-and-user

9. Tweak metadata

Metadata is set of additional parameters that describe your station. Typically these are parameters like type of SDR, antenna brand and type, maybe filters or LNA you're using, but this may be basically anything that you find important enough to be recorded.

A good example of non-standard thing would be the antenna orientation. You may tweak it and then let the Svarog record observations. Later, you may turn it to some other position and after a while compare results.

To generate the template to fill in use the following command:

python station/cli.py metadata

It will print the location of the file (~/.config/svarog/metadata.json) and its content. Feel free to tweak it as you see fit. You may want to add extra data. Any other type will be accepted as long as it's a valid JSON. Also, take a look at submit_obs.py, which explains what the parameters mean. Some additional parameters are set by the Svarog station on its own.

Server installation

Server installation is a manual process. It is assumed that you already have running apache server. Here are the steps needed to get it up and running.

1. Get the latest code

git clone https://github.com/gut-space/svarog

2. Install PostgreSQL:

apt install postgresql postgresql-client
su - postgres
psql
CREATE DATABASE svarog;
CREATE USER svarog WITH PASSWORD 'secret'; -- make sure to use an actual password here
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE svarog TO svarog;

Make sure to either run setup.py or run DB schema migration manually: python3 migrate_db.py.

3. Install Flask dependencies

cd svarog/server
python3 -m virtualenv venv
source venv/bin/activate
python setup.py install

Sometimes it's necessary to explicitly say which python version to use: python3 -m virtualenv --python=python3 venv

This step will install necessary dependencies. It is a good practice to install them in virtual environment. If you don't have virtualenv installed, you can add it with sudo apt install python-virtualenv or similar command for your system. Alternatively, you may use venv. However, make sure the virtual environment is created in venv directory.

You can start flask manually to check if it's working. This is not needed once you have apache integration complete.

cd server
./svarog-web.py

4. Set up your HTTP server

Svarog has been run successfully with both Apache and Nginx. The very subjective experience of one of Svarog authors is that Apache's WSGI configuration is much more fragile, but is somewhat simpler due to fewer components. On the other hand, using Nginx requires additional application server (Unit), but it is much more robust and flexible. Other stacks are most likely possible, but were not tried.

Depending on your choice, please follow either 4A or 4B sections.

4A. Apache configuration

The general goal is to have an apache2 running with WSGI scripting capability that runs Flask. See an example apache2 configuation. You may want to tweak the paths and TLS configuration to use LetsEncrypt or another certificate of your choice. Make sure the paths are actually pointing to the right directory. There is an example WSGI script in svarog.wsgi. It requires some tuning specific to your deloyment.

4B. NGINX + UNIT Configuration

An alternative to apache is to run Nginx with Unit application server. Example configuration for nginx is available here. This file should in general be copied to /etc/nginx/sites-available/svarog and then linked to /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/svarog. Make sure you tweak it to your specific deployment.

This deployment requires Unit app server to run and be configured with the unit config file. The configuration can be uploaded using command similar to this:

curl -X PUT --data-binary @nginx/unit.json --unix-socket /var/run/control.unit.sock http://localhost/config

Please consult with Unit docs for details.

You can check Unit's configuration using:

curl --unix-socket /var/run/control.unit.sock http://localhost/config/

5. Grant sudo privileges

Also, you should update the /etc/sudoers file to allow ordinary user (svarog) to restart (apache) or (nginx and unit) server. This will be used by the update script that's being run every day. You should use visudo command to add the following line:

%svarog ALL= NOPASSWD: /bin/systemctl restart apache2

or

%svarog ALL= NOPASSWD: /bin/systemctl restart nginx
%svarog ALL= NOPASSWD: /bin/systemctl restart unit

Alternatively, you can allow restarting all services:

%svarog ALL= NOPASSWD: /bin/systemctl

This is more convenient, but may be a bit risky from the security perspective.