dw-start on buster with rtl sdr won't start with cron job

[yaniveliash]

So I upgraded mu RPi to buster, it's a Pi Zero W.

Been using it for igate for a while with RTL SDR without issues.

Running the following command on my terminal will work great: rtl_fm -f 144.39M - | direwolf -c sdr.conf -r 24000 -D 1 - but of course will catch my terminal and will terminate.

Opening a screen and running it inside works fine too, I can detach and all is good.

However, trying to set a cron job to run dw-start.sh or even running it directly without cron job yield no service - I can even see any error that can indicate what is the issue, the only output that I see on my screen when running it directly is this:

pi@pi-aprs-igate:~ $ ./dw-start.sh
Direwolf in CLI mode start up
There is a screen on:
	574.direwolf	(10/18/19 12:25:20)	(Detached)
1 Socket in /run/screen/S-pi.
-----------------------

running screen -ls will show that there are not detached screens

pi@pi-aprs-igate:~ $ screen -ls
No Sockets found in /run/screen/S-pi.

I also tried to set -x in the bash script to follow, but still, there is nothing odd there that can indicate on an issue.

For now, I just manually open a screen and run the service, but that ain't production ready in my case.

[dranch]

When things were running your previous version of Raspbian, how were you starting things? If you read in the comments of the dw-start.sh script, it can be modified to auto-start the rtl_fm command. You'll need to make those modifications yourself. If you've already made that change to the script, what do you see in the /var/tmp/dw-start.log file?

[rossmckelvie]

I had the same issue on Buster and it has to do with how the command is getting interpreted and passing thru stdin, trying to add this onto the end of a screen command. There was a workaround posted in another issue, and although the direwolf process started correctly it was not inside a screen.

I was able to fix this by creating a file start.sh:

#!/bin/bash

rtl_fm -f 144.39M - | direwolf -c /home/pi/direwolf/sdr.conf -r 24000 -D 1 -

Then in dw-start.sh, I set DWCMD="/home/pi/start.sh"

[dranch]

A new version of this script (intended for RTL SDR users) but has several other improvements that may help standard sound device Direwolf use cases) is offered here: https://groups.io/g/direwolf/message/8002