I want to add a couple more clues here in case anyone decides to go hunting around concerning the 'crashes' I experienced running the Astroberry Server. As I said I am running on an Rpi 4 with 8 Gb of Ram. I was running Astroberry Server 2.0.3 and Kstars 3.5.0. Initially, I had a lot of index files loaded, because occasionally I would try to solve using the main camera (ASI533 on an SCT 9.25, FOV ~ 17 arcmin!), while most of the time I would solve using my e-finder (ASI120 on an Orion 9x50 - FOV~1.2 degrees). The first clue that something was not right was when the program tired to load all the index files into memory (2.6 Gb), I did have enough memory to do that, but the logs indicated some were not getting loaded. So I reduced the index files to only those for the e-finder (.6 Gb), that solved the loading issue, but I was still experiencing crashes during "capture, solve and sync." We have had a week of clouds and rain, so I was running everything in my garage, using all the equipment, but simulating imaging. I would run a sequence that would consist of "load and slew" to a saved image (NOTE: the program rarely crashed on this, I say rarely only because 'never' is too strong a statement, I don't recall it every crashing on "load and slew," even in real use under the stars. I would say 90% of the crashes were associated with "capture, solve with sync checked"), then I would do a blank "capture, solve and sync" and repeat this sequence until the system crashed or didn't (after say 6 tries). I ran this "experiment" under different settings of the StellaSolver; 1) - default (which I assume means parallel processing, and 2) - single thread solving. I don't recall it ever crashing under the second condition. Our options (I did have help) at this point where to dig deeper into the program to figure out why it was crashing (the logs were leading us to the routines associated with
KdTree
) or go a different route with a different OS or even processor. A couple of quick tests suggested that the Ubuntu 64 bit OS was handling the math (no very small or very large numbers in the logs) better than the Raspbian 32 bit OS. So that is how I ended up where I am now.
Now I will add a few more key items in setting up Ubuntu 20.1 on this Rpi.
# - to install ssh: sudo apt install openssh-server after doing this I could then use putty on my laptop to log into the Rpi if I had been running headless.
# - installing Lightdm and x11vnc - I found this
YouTube
very helpful.
# - when I installed Lightdm it told me that I already had the latest version, however it did not activate it and gdm3 was still the default display manager,
had to run sudo dpkg-reconfigure lightdm to bring up the screen that allows you to switch between the two display managers.
# - install x11vnc with this first: sudo apt update then: sudo apt -y install x11vnc and this: sudo ufw allow 5900/tcp
# - after installing x11vnc you need to set up and store a password: sudo x11vnc –storepasswd YOURPWD /etc/x11vnc.pass
and modify the .service file using 'nano' editor as root: sudo nano /lib/systemd/system/x11vnc.service
My file looks like this:
[Unit]
Description=Start x11vnc at startup.
Requires=display-manager.service
After=multi-user.target
[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/bin/x11vnc -env FD_XDM=1 -auth /var/run/lightdm/root/:0 -forever -loop -display :0 -geometry 1024x768 -noxdamage -repeat -rfbauth /etc/x11vnc.pass -rfbport 5900 -shared -o /var/log/x11vnc.log
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
the meaning of these settings are explained in the
X11vnc Manual
once you have modified the .service file you need to reload the vnc Daemon: sudo systemctl daemon-reload and enable the service: sudo systemctl enable x11vnc.service
If you make any changes to any of the .service files (in /lib/systemd/system) you should stop that service first, make change, reload the Daemon and restart the service using the "systemctl" command
you can check on the status of any service with that command as well, as in: sudo systemctl status x11vnc.service
# - Now you are reading to install the programs, but you need the Python Package installer: pip3 sudo apt-get -y install python3-pip
# - Install INDI, Kstars and INDI Web Manager.
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:mutlaqja/ppa
sudo apt update
sudo apt -y install indi-full kstars-bleeding python3-pip python-is-python3
sudo -H pip3 install indiweb
# - install IndiWebManager
wget
raw.githubusercontent.com/knro/indiwebma...diwebmanager.service
put your userID in the indiwebmanager.service file and copy it to sudo cp indiwebmanager.service /etc/systemd/system/
make it executable sudo chmod 644 /etc/systemd/system/indiwebmanager.service
reload the Daemon, since you modified the service sudo systemctl daemon-reload
enable the service sudo systemctl enable indiwebmanager.service
# - Reboot to start indi web manager,
# - I found all the Indi device driver files in: /usr/share/indi
# - to run indiwebmanager open browser - go to localhost:8624
# - to install PHD2 sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pch/phd2 and then sudo apt install phd2
At this point I was able to run all the necessary programs to access my equipment and run Kstar/Ekos/PHD2 in the Ubuntu environment. As we are still having several days of rain, it will be some time before I
can actually test this environment out in the real conditions. I am hopeful that it will have solved my previous problems and will be enjoying evenings of imaging again.
thats all and thanks all!
