signal tools

Summary

"signal tools" aims to provide a Docker container with the most importand lab tools for working with signals of any kind, including recording and processing.

Tools

• rf
  • gnuradio
    • gr-baz
  • rtl-sdr
  • gr-osmocom
  • hackrf
  • bladerf
  • UHD
  • gqrx
• Networking
  • Wireshark
• misc
  • vim
  • scipy

This container is based on the phusion Ubuntu 16.04 base image.

Getting started

Building the Container

To create the Docker container execute the ./generate.sh script. it will build a Container named "signal-tools-container". In the build process all files from the configs/home directory will be stored in /home/signals in the container. This will be handy, if you want to use your own config files. Its importend that you store your ssh public key in configs/ssh/authorized_keys to access the running container.

Running the Container

To execute the Container run

./run.sh

You will get a bash shell in the container The normal run.sh runs an unprivileged container. If you want to access an USB device like an SDR or locic analyzer you have to run

./run-priv-usb.sh

This will run a privileged container with acces to ALL your usb devices. So be carefull, because the root user in the container is virtually root outside the container! To mitigate this problems you can apply an apparmor profile to the container (see the run-priv-usb.sh script).

It would be a wa better idea to pass the device with the --device=<dev> option but i didn't get it work yet.

Accessing the Container

The container can be accessed over ssh with the pubkey in configs/ssh/authorized_keys. For GUI Applications like gnuradio-companion its possible to use x2go. You can find more infos at http://wiki.x2go.org/doku.php/doc:newtox2go .

Misc

Existing Containers

If you want to run a existing container execute

docker start signal-tools-container

User

The signals user password is "signals" and the user has sudo capabilities.

FAQ

Q: Why not as a VM?

VMs have problems with io. Its hard to get gigabit-like throughputs to and from an SDR using XEN or KVM. PCI handling would be quite ok, but only on systems with an IOMMU.

Credits

Thanks to Marcus D. Leech who wrote the gnuradio install script, which this container is based on.