Running Aether-gate as a service (Linux / Raspberry Pi)

These systemd units run the gate unattended — surviving terminal/SSH close, restarting on a crash, and (critically) stopping it with a catchable SIGTERM so the gate can shut down gracefully.

Why a service, not the launcher

The Setup UI (aether_gate.setup, port 8730) starts a gate as a child process. When the launcher or its terminal/SSH session dies, the child is hard-killed — it never runs its shutdown, so for an IC-9700 the 0x05 disconnect never goes out and the radio keeps a phantom RS-BA1 session that blocks the next start ("came up then jumped to the other radio after 2–3 s").

systemd fixes this: it owns the process, stops it with SIGTERM (which __main__.py turns into the same graceful path as Ctrl-C → adapter.close() → 0x05), waits TimeoutStopSec for the disconnect to flush, and only then escalates to SIGKILL. A clean systemctl stop/restart therefore releases the radio cleanly. (A hard crash still can't send 0x05 — but the gate's own open-failure path then detects the phantom, cleans up, and stops, and Restart=on-failure retries after the radio's stale window.)

Units

Unit	Purpose	Port
aether-gate-7300.service	IC-7300 USB CI-V + USB-audio bridge, RX/control only	ctl :8731
aether-gate-9700.service	Always-on IC-9700 LAN bridge	ctl :8732
kenwood-gate.service	Kenwood CAT + SDR-spectrum bridge	ctl :8734
aether-gate-setup.service	First-boot Setup UI (interactive)	:8730

Install

Each unit has EDIT THESE markers — set the radio IP/credentials, this host's LAN --ip, and AE's --ae IP before installing.

For the IC-7300 unit, stop wfweb / wfwebrtc first if they normally own the same USB serial/audio devices. The IC-7300 adapter is intentionally RX/control only: it does not send CI-V PTT and it keeps RTS/DTR low on open and close.

sudo cp aether-gate-9700.service /etc/systemd/system/
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable --now aether-gate-9700
journalctl -u aether-gate-9700 -f          # watch it connect
sudo systemctl stop aether-gate-9700       # graceful — sends 0x05, releases the radio

Verifying graceful stop (the point of Blocker #2)

sudo systemctl start aether-gate-9700      # connects, holds
sudo systemctl stop  aether-gate-9700      # SIGTERM -> graceful "bye" in the log
sudo systemctl start aether-gate-9700      # should reconnect cleanly, NO phantom wait

Watch journalctl -u aether-gate-9700: a graceful stop logs bye; the restart should reach [civ] stream healthy without the connect failed … (authed=True) phantom error.

One host can only advertise on :4992 once — run at most one gate per IP, or give each a distinct --ip/--port (the Pi5 uses eth0 for the always-on gate and wlan0 for launcher-started ones).