Issue with 0.83 reverting UI, FTP settings

[astrobrothers]

I've had a working 0.83 build for a few months, occasionally seeing this issue pop up and today I think I figured out one way to cause it.
I've noticed from time to time my overlay choices (RGB color, font) would change back to what I had set 5 months ago. Not a huge deal since it was generally just the overlay colors and it was seemingly random when it would happen. This week I finally set up an external website on AWS, had it working fine for about a day. The postData.sh was having an issue, changing directories once it was on the AWS so was fiddling with sftp settings. Ran out of ideas, so I rebooted the Pi. When allsky restarted, it didn't just overwrite my UI settings, it also reset my ftp config file. Any ideas why this is happening? I'm pretty sure this was a fresh build when I installed it. Thanks!

[EricClaeys]

@astrobrothers Just so I understand, you're saying settings in the ftp-settings.sh file as well as in the WebUI are being changed? The only time Allsky ever changes those is when you change them in the WebUI - either the "Camera Settings" page for the overlay settings, or the "Editor" page for the ftp-settings.sh file.
I can't think of any other time Allsky would change those files, nor any place in the code that would do it.
Can you check the date of the files now, and if it ever happens again? It may give us an idea of what's happening.

cd ~/allsky
ls -l config/ftp-settings.sh
ls -l /etc/raspap/*.json

In the meantime, you may want to save a copy of those files in case they get totally corrupted.

[astrobrothers]

@EricClaeys thanks for the quick reply.
-rwxr-xr-x 1 www-data www-data 5462 Nov 3 12:58 config/ftp-settings.sh
and
-rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 20335 Sep 20 11:42 /etc/raspap/camera_options_RPiHQ.json
-rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 22888 Sep 20 11:42 /etc/raspap/camera_options_ZWO.json
-rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 1786 Nov 7 17:10 /etc/raspap/settings_RPiHQ.json
-rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 1508 Sep 19 16:30 /etc/raspap/settings_ZWO.json

So... I'm guessing this means that it wasn't actually saving to file, right? When it boots up, it's pulling from these files and they have old info. I wonder why mine aren't saving or how some of these values stay but not others when I click the save & restart allsky. Oh and I'm not the owner.... www-data!? I assume [user] should own those files right?

[EricClaeys]

@astrobrothers The files in /etc/raspap should be owned/grouped to www-data, since that's the login that the web server runs in.
Do an "ls -l ~/allsky/config. I'm pretty sure all the files in configshould be owned/grouped topi. You can do a simple experiment: in the WebUI, go to the "Editor" page then select "ftp-setting.sh". Add a space in some line that contains a comment (starts with #`). Then save the file and check the date.
In the "Camera Settings" page, change some setting. I'll often change something like the owner from "Eric Claeys" to "Eric Claeys" (an extra space). Then UNcheck the "restart" box and save the settings. Now check the /etc/raspap/settings_*.json file for your camera type and see if the date changed.

Let me know how it goes.

[astrobrothers]

Interesting. This time, the UI did display the "Saved" popup at the top of screen - I forgot it did that because I haven't seen it in a while. FTP settings stayed this time as well. Obviously the date changed for those two files - what's weird is the user for ftp-settings.sh is now "pi" - but there is no user named pi on this Pi. I typically change my admin username for security reasons - we get hacked a lot at MIT and some of these will have static IPs. Does this mean the save command changes the user by default to pi ?

For now, I've added "pi" to www-data group with adduser pi www-data and I changed permissions using chmod -R 775 /etc/raspap/*.json. Same for the config files. Fortunately I wrote everything down on paper, so I should be able to get this back to where I was.
Q: since I'm building several of these, would it be a better practice to just stick with the default user, pi?

[EricClaeys]

If ls -l showed "pi" as the owner then there IS a pi login, although it may not be used.
The current release assumes "pi" is the login Allsky runs as, so you may want to stick with that for now. The next Allsky release removes that assumption.
The current version of Bullseye did away with the "pi" login and forces you to name the default login, which can be "pi". We currently suggest using "pi" in our next release but should reconsider for security's sake.

Updating a file via the WebUI' "Editor" page resets the file owner:group to pi:pi. It's hard

[astrobrothers]

Thanks again for the attention to this issue. 👍 Short term, I placed "pi" into the into www-data group and fixed some of the permissions where necessary users/groups weren't allowed to read/write - ugly hacks, but it worked. Fortunately, I wrote most of the complicated aws login stuff down.

Long term, I'll start with a fresh build of your next release once it's ready.

I also learned another lesson that made matters worse with these permissions. I had been using XRDP to remote login during the focusing phase of this camera and write my python scripts for the weather text. To use that RD protocol and have images show up, you have to use a different user than sudo, so I created a 2nd sudo - that opened up a can of worms with permissions and files not saving permanently when logging back in normally with the admin user.

[EricClaeys]

Our next release has a very nice system for adding text and images anywhere you want on an image, which also makes it easier to include weather data.