[arm-allstar] V1.5 Installation Feedback

[Pawlowski, Adam]

Hi all,

I spent some time with our club last week trying to bring our antique 1.0 PC -> 1.2 Pi2 installation up to V1.5. As you can imagine, we have a mix of computer , radio , and electronics persons with varying backgrounds so I spent a bit of time trying to go through the setup documentation from hamvoip.org so they'd feel comfortable.

I went off the rails somewhere so I wanted to provide this feedback and maybe learn what I screwed up.

We went over the basic configuration of the node using the allstarlink portal. I had printed the previous simpleusb/rpt configurations and went over the how this looks in the configuration documentation versus how this is displayed on the website. Last time I ran through this (it was quite some time ago) you simply installed the software, entered your node ID and password, and it sucked down the configuration settings from the portal. This didn't work at all, and I'm sort of gathering from the mailing that there's a transition to a new portal eventually, and it looks like portal configuration is not going to be around there. I sort of miss that, especially if we want to make a demo project for our club on installing and setting up the system, and here's why I'd say that:

There is some non-traditional terminal type that doesn't play well with PuTTY which turned the menu into a bad time. The screen is difficult for many to read, and resizing the window breaks it completely, at least without changing the terminal type. Not sure why that is a thing. This we can get over I think.

The node configuration display does go out of its way to show you the parameters from the configuration file, so that you can see what you're configuring, but, I had a hard time trying to explain some of the parameters. While they can be sort of interesting enough to explain, with "rxboost" meaning not inserting an attenuator, for example, some of them change the wording around 180 degrees. That confused us a bit but we got over it.

At this point I know I screwed up. We left both URIs plugged in when we changed the SD Card and of course the usb devices were enumerated backwards, and of course one system required inverted signaling. Second node configuration is clearly an advanced user setup at this point given the need to have to edit files and key in changes. While we were able to recover from this, there was more than one occasion where we had to reboot the system. We got to a point where a node was online, and it was keying fine, and we could see the RX arrow moving in the tune menu, but no audio was repeated. After a reboot it was fine. Sometimes, after restarting asterisk from the menu the system restarts unexpectedly. In the past I did note that asterisk seemed to die and not restart properly with a core restart command and the system had to be rebooted anyways - is there a watchdog now that is doing this?

We had trouble with rebooting and Echolink coming up before network was ready, realizing it couldn't reach the echolink hosts, and then unloading the channel driver. Is this still something? I'm going to try setting it up later.

All in all I wanted to provide that feedback in case it is useful, or, in case it's just me who is really bad at reading directions.

Best,

Adam Pawlowski
KC2YQF