Good afternoon,
My name is Rob, WX1N, and I've been a ham for around 25 years. I'm new to APRS and not experienced with Linux. I'm hoping someone can provide me with some advice on what I hope is a simple question. I am using Xastir, a Raspberry Pi 3, and a Mobilinkd TNC. I am still getting things fine tuned but I have the overall setup operational. This setup is located in my pickup and as such does not always have internet access. The Raspberry Pi does not have a real clock, and therefore if it is started without internet access, the date and time are incorrect. This results in an invalid timestamp on my packets, which results in them not showing on aprs.fi. It appears I can attempt to solve this in a number of different ways - set the SUID bit on the Xastir binary so Xastir can set the system time; set up GPS software that will masquerade as an NTP server allowing the Pi to set the clock from the GPS itself; run a batch script at startup to manually read the GPS and set the system time; configure Xastir to use the "fixed station" option so it does not send a time stamp; figure out which command Xastir uses to set the time and configure the Pi to allow any user to use that command. I was successful in getting the Pi to allow any user to use the "date" command, but this did not enable Xastir to set the system time, so it must use a different method. I have the GPS working fine with Xastir so I don't want to set up scripts or utilities and risk monopolizing the GPS device so that Xastir can't connect to it. As near as I can tell, the "fixed station" option sends an APRS location only packet without timestamp, which I suppose would work but doesn't seem like a proper solution. At the moment, my solution is to set the SUID bit on the Xastir binary. This is allowing Xastir to set the system time and seems to solve my problem. However, I'm unclear as to whether this is an excessive security risk and/or a bad method of doing things. One Xastir page mentions that this method is necessary to use an AX.25 server, but another page mentions in capital letters not to run Xastir as root. I do not know if setting the SUID bit is the same as running it as root but it seems like it would be. If anyone could shed some light on whether my method is a good practice or not, whether it's practically safe or not, and whether there's a better way to solve my original problem, I would be grateful. 73, Rob, WX1N _______________________________________________ Xastir mailing list [email protected] http://xastir.org/mailman/listinfo/xastir
