FakeAPRS

This is a fake APRS daemon designed to emulate traffic you might receive on a tcp serial port. It comprises of a server and a traffic injection client.

The purpose of this to facilitate building real APRS clients and giving them a traffic stream to test against.

Requirements

You need the python library twisted.

• On a Debian system: sudo apt-get install python-twisted
• On a system with pip: sudo pip install -r requirements.txt

Quick Start

1. Start the server: python fakeaprsserver.py
2. Start the client: python fakeaprsclient.py data/sampletraffic.txt

Server

fakeaprsserver.py will open a tcp port that clients can connect to. Any text sent by these clients will be relayed to any other client connected.

Usage: fakeaprsserver.py [options]

This is a basic "pub/usb" server taken right from
http://www.twistedmatrix.com and some arguments added
on.

  python fakeaprsserver.py

Any client (even telnet) that connects to this will be able
to send lines of text to each other.


Options:
  -h, --help     show this help message and exit
  --port=PORT    The port to listen on. Defaults to port 1025.
  --iface=IFACE  The interface to listen to. Default is localhost.

Client

fakeaprsclient.py reads in a text file containing traffic (one has been provided in data/sampletraffic.txt) and pushes that traffic to the defined tcp port, prepending it with a current timestamp.

If no file is given, it will default to data/sampletraffic.txt

Usage: fakeaprsclient.py [options] trafficfile

    This is a fake aprs client. It will read in a file
    containing APRS messages, prepend a current time stamp
    and loop over it continuously, injecting traffic into
    an tcp aprs system.

      python fakeaprsclient.py <path/to/traffic.txt>

    If no file is specificied, it will default to
    data/sampletraffic.txt.
    

Options:
  -h, --help     show this help message and exit
  --port=PORT    The port to connect to. Default to port 1025.
  --iface=IFACE  The interface to connect to. Default is localhost.
  --delay=DELAY  The number of seconds between sending lines. Default to 1.2
                 seconds
  --strip        Strip timestamps (experimental). Will remove @.*z timestamps
                 from messages, off by default.

Vagrant

We use vagrant to test this system. Assuming you have Vagrant and a provider such as VirtualBox installed, you can spin up a virtual machine and run these programs inside it.

To start the virtual machine: vagrant up

To ssh into the running virtual machine (linux): vagrant ssh

If you are using an application like putty and want to know how to ssh in, use vagrant ssh-config to get the parameters to enter into your client.

Once inside the virtual machine, all of these files are located in /vagrant

To halt the VM, type vagrant halt (from outside the VM).

To destroy the VM, type vagrant destroy (from outside the VM).