Claim a receiver from another network
Since September you could claim a receiver that is already feeding us under an id we didn't issue, which is what every adsb.im and ultrafeeder box does. There was one condition: you had to press the button from the same network as the receiver. We check ownership by address. If your browser and the stream arrive from the same place, the stream is yours to take.
That rule left out a real group of people. A feeder wrote to us about three stations in Boston. They own two. The third they manage for owners who travel a lot, and they aren't on its network. Plenty of you run something similar: a Pi at a relative's house, an antenna on a club roof, a box at a holiday home you reach over SSH. For all of those, the Claim button simply never appeared.
How it works now
On the feed page, open Add receiver and tick the box that says your receiver already feeds Skydex under its own id. You can paste that id (the uuid= value in the Skydex line of your feeder config), but you usually don't need to. If only one unclaimed receiver feeds from that network, we find it.
If your browser happens to be on the receiver's network, the station is linked right away, as before. If it isn't, the page gives you a one-time line:
curl -sS -X POST https://feed.skydex.online/api/public/feeders/claim/<code>Run it on the receiver itself, over SSH, or on any device on the same network. There's a wget version for boxes without curl. A few seconds later the station appears on your account with the days, aircraft and coverage it has already built. The command works once and expires after 15 minutes.
The proof is the same as before: the request has to come from the address the receiver feeds from. The command only lets you send that proof from a terminal instead of a browser. It goes to feed.skydex.online on purpose, which is the host your receiver already talks to, so the request leaves the network the same way the data does.
If someone claims your receiver this way
A command can be misused. Someone could create one on their own account and talk you into running it as a "fix". So stations linked by command carry a mark. If you later check your address on the feed page and see your receiver belongs to an account you don't know, you get a Report button. A moderator looks at it, and you get a notification with the decision. If the station goes back to you, its history comes with it, because history is stored against the receiver's id, not against the account.
Only run a claim command you got from the feed page yourself.
Also fixed
While building this we found that the address check could be fooled by a forged header on a request sent straight to our server. It's closed now: we only trust the address Cloudflare reports when the request really came through Cloudflare.
Questions and edge cases (VPNs, IPv6 next to IPv4, several receivers behind one address) are welcome in the feeder channel on Discord. The full setup guide for new stations is on the feeder landing.