[arm-allstar] AllStar reliability -- was: dtmf macros for repeater control

[David McGough]

Hi Willem,

I thought I'd comment about my experiences with AllStar reliability. My 
experience has been that there are two parts to reliability:

First, there is the day-to-day "situation normal" scenario. If a SCOM or
Link-Comm gets 5 nines of up-time, I'd give AllStar a solid 4 nines. This
difference is largely due to my mucking around with configs at 2AM, etc.

As a real-life example, I just got the stats off a custom mini-ITX PC
based AllStar setup that I built: Linux uptime: 72 days. AllStar uptime:  
71+ days. TX time:  271+ hours. TX time today: 3+ hours. What makes this
interesting is that this PC is located at 1700 feet HAAT, in a cabinet on
a TV tower--a REALLY hard to reach place! And, the PC uptime reflects the
last time I was doing maintenance in person, at that cabinet!

Second, there is the infrequent "oh $@&#" scenario--something like a
direct lightning strike. Here is where is find AllStar GREATLY superior.  
For perhaps $200, I can have a complete, spare AllStar system sitting on
the shelf, ready to go (and, I do--several, in fact).  I never had spare
Link-Comm's sitting around, due to cost; so, minimally, we were down for
days (or weeks)  waiting on parts or repairs. Once a replacement
controller was obtained, all the levels had to be manually reset and it
had to be reprogrammed, manually, via DTMF (yuck!). This is all moderately
tedious, frequently requiring the repeater to be sitting on the test
bench, with an experienced technician performing the setup.

Comparatively. with AllStar, I can deploy a spare system in minutes. No 
audio level woes (since these are set digitally), etc. Just drop the 
backup config files in place, plug in URI hardware and go. It is literally 
that simple!

The biggest argument I hear from people is: oh, that's PC based!!!  
Everybody knows that PC's lock up all the time!! Well, maybe PC's running
some unmentioned very popular commercial OS--but, not Linux! If you've got
stable hardware, Linux just sits there and runs. And, runs. And, runs.

So, obviously, I'm sold on the AllStar solution--hence why I'm investing
so much time helping to improve and promote it.


73, David KB4FXC


On Sun, 27 Dec 2015, Willem Schreuder wrote:

> On Sun, 27 Dec 2015, Doug Crompton wrote:
> 
> > I might add though that Allsar makes an excellent repeater controller 
> > and migrating to using it rather than the expensive dedicated 
> > controllers might be something to look at.
> 
> That is what we are working towards, but I also hate to throw away 
> perfectly good controllers.  They have proved to be really reliable so we 
> still need to convince the public service folks that we can reproduce that 
> reliability.  I would argue that the flexibilty of Allstar far outweighs 
> potential reliability, but you probably have heard all the counter 
> arguments.
> 
> So this may be a temporary use case, but it would still be something 
> useful to be able to do.
> 
> -73 Willem AC0KQ
> 
> ================================================================
> Dr. Willem A. Schreuder,  President,  Principia Mathematica
> Address:  445 Union Blvd, Suite 230,  Lakewood, CO  80228, USA
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