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REFERENCE TO FCC-DB: ULS AMATEUR LICENSE IMPORTER

Description

fcc-db is a project to download and import FCC ULS licensing & application data for the Amateur Radio service.

Copyright 2016-2021, Josh Cepek

This project is avilable under the GPLv3; see LICENSE.md for details.

Quick start guide

Please read the ULS Publish Schedule & Timetamp notes below for context. This quickstart assumes readers know what sequence of daily zips have been downloaded more recently than the latest weekly to feed to the importer.

Prereqs

uls-fetch.sh requires only curl and a POSIX-sh enviornment.

import.pl requires:

  • 7-zip binary 7z (often from 7zip or p7zip distro packages)
  • Perl 5, and the following perl-libs (via your distro or CPAN)
  • DBI
  • DBD::SQLite

First-use prep

uls-fetch.sh is what downloads ULS archives, both initially and to check for subsequent updates. It needs a directory to hold zips, info metadata files, and an ephemeral temp-dir for downloads; all 3 may be the same but need not be.

Easiest is to create a BASEDIR anywhere you like and use this, optionally with subdirs for zips and info files. If you'd prefer to manually define all 3 locations, see the help output with -h to the fetch script. The commands below assume use of a BASEDIR at /usr/local/var/uls.

Optionally, copy the *.ini.sample files to *.ini names and edit paths to taste. Note that schema/index files will be relative to the invoker's directory, so absolute paths may be desired if invoked elsewhere. Licensing & Applicaiton database must be unique, as they function independently.

Fetching ULS daily files

This process checks ULS metadata and downloads missing or changed archives. See the -h argument for per-dir control or selective archive options.

./uls-fetch.sh -b /usr/local/var/uls

Importing weeklies

To (re)-create SQLite files from weeklies, call import.pl. While manual options are allowed, use of INI config files are suggested as convenient shortcuts.

./import.pl -n -c conf-lic.ini /usr/local/var/uls/weekly_l.zip
./import.pl -n -c conf-app.ini /usr/local/var/uls/weekly_a.zip

Note that if any sequence of newer dailies is available, they can be appended after the weekly archive for a one-shot import.

Importing dailies

When importing new dailies into an existing database, omit the -n argument to avoid creating an empty dataset, meaning only daily changes are applied.

./import.pl -c conf-lic.ini /usr/local/var/uls/daily_l_{sun,mon}.zip
./import.pl -c conf-app.ini /usr/local/var/uls/daily_a_{sat,sun,mon}.zip

Typical ULS Publish Schedule

Zips are published 7-days a week, with full datasets weekly on weekends. The daily files are not additive, and each new week requires importing the full weekly in addition to the dailys (if up-to-the-date importing is desired.)

If everything is working smoothly at the FCC, weeklies are produced:

  • Saturday mid-morning for Applications
  • Sunday mid-morning for Licenses

Once a weekly is availble, it can be imported as a "new" (-n with import.pl) database, re-creating the full data it conatins. To import dailies after, the file named with the day the weekly was published should be used.

That is, one could import the app weekly then sat, sun, & mon dailies. For license weeklies, the next-in-sequence is sun, not sat. Currently nothing prevents the importer from blindly applying old dailies to an existing database, so don't do that.

Also note that if today is Wednesday, you will not get "today's" changes until Thursday. That is to say if you download or apply daily archives with "wed" in the name, you're actually referring to changes from a week ago. Same warning applies before Thurday's publication of that Wednesday data.

Check the *.info files for publication times, or to check when the tables themselves were exported, extract the counts file:

7z x -so /usr/local/var/uls/daily_l_wed.zip counts

A Note on ULS Timestamps

The steps of downloading ULS table data and importing it are discrete. Currently no logic exists to identify last-imported data, as timestamps in the archive itself (and its FTP modification times) are not reliable.

Usually the dates of processing and archive modification on the FTP server are the day after the data contained within (Monday data published on Tuesday, etc.) However, ULS sometimes experiences failures and re-runs processing at a later date.

Use the modification dates with a small grain of salt, especially if they don't match the above expectation.

Todo

  • Sanity check zips fed to import.pl, rejecting out-of-sequence imports

  • Scan ULS zip dir to auto-import newer data automatically

  • Identify date of data by table content, not created/modified timestamps