[arm-allstar] Voice announcements stopping

[Nate Bargmann]

This is an issue that first appeared back in November around the 13th,
at least that is when I first noticed it and just before our weekly net.
Prior to that the system had run for just at a year without issue.

The symptom I saw then in Supermon2 and now is that playing an
announcement command such as the time and weather is that PTT shows
asserted but no audio comes from the transmitter nor is it keyed.  Also,
if the repeater is active Supermon2 shows no COS activation.  A neighbor
whose repeater we link to via Echolink for the net reported hearing no
audio from my node which stands to reason as Asterisk never sees the COS
so it likely never got any audio.

My setup is that the AllStar node is connected to the link port of a
CAT-200B controller so the repeater remains functional but AllStar
appears inoperative.  HamVoip is running on a Pi 3B+ and the interface
to the controller is a Techno-by-George ARA-1 FOB.  Everything is in a
box so I doubt there is rodent damage as it comes back working after a
reboot.

Fast forward to two days ago and I noticed that top of the hour
announcements had ceased.  Then as back in November rebooting from the
Admin menu recovered all functions.  Immediately after the reboot I shut
down AutoSky in case it was causing an issue as it had been very busy
with this week's winter storm and wind chill warnings.

Since it did it again today and since the net isn't until tomorrow
evening, I have a bit of time to do some forensic investigation.
Checking with the lsusb command shows the audio interface is still
present:

# lsusb
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 0d8c:0013 C-Media Electronics, Inc. 

Both the AllStar and Echolink status pages show my node is active and
there is one active AllStar connection so I'm reasonably confident that
Asterisk is still running given that and what I see from the Supermon2
Web page (not publicly accessible since I have access locked down with
SSH private key and I am reverse tunneling HTTP to my local computer) is
simply reporting what Asterisk is doing.

Is there any way to query the status of the C-Media chip?  Or am I stuck
with reboots until I can get access to the site to replace the interface
board (I do have a spare)?

73, Nate, N0NB

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