[arm-allstar] Link Activity Timer Not Always Working

[Larry Aycock]

Hello,

For a while now, I have been using the link activity timers on a few nodes/repeaters, and they have been working for the most part.  I have a hub node, which I just moved to a cloud server.  I have my repeater node, a friend’s repeater node, and my dad’s simplex node connecting to my hub node.  On my repeater, my friend’s repeater, and my dad’s node, we use the link activity timer to disconnect all nodes and reconnect back to my hub node.  As I mentioned, this has been working for the most part.  However, on my friend’s repeater and my dad’s node, it will occasionally disconnect from the hub, and won’t reconnect.  Hours will pass and it will not reconnect back to the hub.  Eventually, one of us will notice the link is down, and send the command to run the script, and it reconnects back to the hub.  Nothing has changed on either of the nodes, and it seems like this problem is occurring much more frequently within the past week.

Note that my repeater has not had this problem with disconnecting and remaining disconnected.  However, the hub node was, prior to this morning, hosted on the same RPi as my repeater node.  I moved the hub node to a cloud server for several reasons, but was also trying to troubleshoot this problem.  Unfortunately, even once I moved the hub to the cloud, I found the problem with the two nodes remaining disconnected is still happening.  I am baffled by this problem because it doesn’t always happen.  I have not been able to consistently recreate the problem, so I have not been able to identify the cause.

Below is a copy of the part from my rpt.conf file used on my repeater.  Remember that I am not having this problem with my repeater, but the same lines are used in my dad’s and my friend’s rpt.conf files.

; ************************* LINK SETTINGS - values in seconds *************************

nolocallinkct=0
                                                                ; Send unlinkedct instead of linkedct if
                                                                ; another local node is connected to this
                                                                ; node (hosted on the same server).

lnkactenable=1
                                                                ; The link activity timer may be used to reset
                                                                ; a link configuration back to a default
                                                                ; configuration if a user changes how the node
                                                                ; is linked. This helps in situations where the
                                                                ; user forgets to reset the system to the default
                                                                ; values, or drives out of range.

lnkacttime=3600
                                                                ; This sets the amount of time to wait before
                                                                ; executing the inactivity macro. Set to a value
                                                                ; between 180 and 2000000 seconds.

lnkactmacro=*934*76*73501265*935#
;*934 disables telem, *76 disconnects all nodes, *73501265 reconnects to hub, *935 re-enables telem
;note: I have seen other use *52 here to run macro #2.  However, in my testing, I found that did not work at all.  Instead, I entered the commands directly in the line above.  I do have the *52 macro with the same command line so I can execute it using DTMF.
; This is the function to execute when the activity
                                                                ; timer expires. This can either be a function or
                                                                ; another macro defined in the [macros] stanza.

lnkacttimerwarn=/etc/asterisk/local/30seconds-reset
                                                                ; For a 30 second warning message, set this to the
                                                                ; path of a ulaw or pcm sound file to play locally
                                                                ; when there is 30 seconds left on the activity timer.
                                                                ; Defualts to /var/lib/asterisk/sounds


It behaves as though the link activity timer somehow is disabled occasionally after disconnecting from all nodes because I would expect the timer to re-run an hour later again and attempt to reconnect.  Any ideas on where I can look to try to resolve this problem?  Also, I’m happy to post other parts of the config files from my dad’s node if someone has a need for additional info.  I’m just not sure what to post for this.  Any help is appreciated.


73, Larry, N6LKA


Sent from Mail<https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=550986> for Windows 10