[arm-allstar] Jim Dixon SK and Hamvoip Status

[Doug Crompton]

As many of you might already know, one of the founding fathers of Allstar,
Jim Dixon, WB6NIL, became a Silent Key about December 16th. While not a
Senior Citizen, Jim experienced deteriorating health over the last few
years.  Dave and I often talked about contingency plans, should any life
changing events occur, since Jim has really been the primary "keeper of
the keys" for many years. The allstarlink domains are in his name and many
other things were dependent on him for daily AllStar operation, such as
the current node registration system, which regularly shows signs of
overload.

Many of you may not know that in May, 2016, Dave helped rebuild the status
server (http://stats.allstarlink.org ), writing new software and
changing the database engine used, eliminating the erratic performance
issues that plagued the stats pages for years. He also improved the
bubble maps. It is a solid system now.  Unfortunately, the registration
server didn't get any updates at that time.

As an outcome of discussions and concerns, the hamvoip team has developed
a software fall-back
​ ​
​contingency ​
​
plan to keep things going, at least within the
hamvoip user-base. We have a lot of users out there and the numbers are
still steadily growing. Rest assured we will not let you down or let
things die, at least not in our side of this wonderful AllStar community.
The changes we have developed are also a big step forward for Allstar,
making node updates almost instantaneous, rather than the up to 10 minute
wait at startup on the current system. The new system is designed to
address many issues, including improved results for mobile nodes,
satellite and cellular systems, where nodelist downloads are currently
problematic.

Because of Jim's death and the uncertainly in the AllStar community right
now, we will probably delay the release of the V1.5 code at least a week
or two. This will allow us to evaluate the state of the system and get any
needed changes into our code. There are some really nice updates in V1.5
that are worth waiting for. There may be some bumps in the road for a
little while but in the end we will have a much better system.

As always, the hamvoip team is committed to maintaining a completely
free and open AllStar architecture, as we perceive was Jim's vision.

Happy New year!

​73, Doug, WA3DSP and David, KB4FXC