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Mark Griffith
Allen, First let me say I have NOTHING against Direwolf and I fully support those hams that are giving up their time to add to the hobby. I developed the PiGate and PiGate RMS devices, so I'm in that group. I also fully support those hams that are building hardware solutions and there are a few. The author of Direwolf advises to reboot it on a regular basis. My testing showed that that was true. You could setup a periodic reboot pretty easily on the Raspberry Pi and that would correct any issues that may be there. My point of view is using it with the PiGate and PiGate RMS devices. Since they are designed for emergency use, I would initially say periodic reboots would be unnecessary since these devices would only be in use for a day or two and then shut down until the next emergency. However, there are lots of folks that use them all the time as 24/7 Winlink email clients or Winlink RMS stations. I have three that are running all the time. The problem then, is when to do a reboot? It would be unfortunate to do an automatic reboot when it is processing an email, or some other necessary function was running. I suppose you could programmatically look to see if something was going on and delay the reboot, but that just adds another layer of complexity. Others here have said Direwolf does not lock up on them. Perhaps I need to retest, although my tests were done about 6 months ago and Direwolf has not been updated since Oct 2018. I would hate to be advising people on something that is not true. I spent a lot of time a few years ago looking for a reliable and fairly easy packet communications system to send emergency email through Winlink. I tested all the software solutions that were available at the time and decided to build the PiGate and PiGate RMS devices because I could not find what I was looking for. In my opinion, and anyone is free to think otherwise, the PiGate and PiGate RMS are the most reliable and easy to use setup. This is based upon years of testing and development, and the excellent work of others like Basil Gunn with paclink-unix and John Wiseman with linbpq. My standards are if you can boot a device and do nothing else, and it continues to work month after month without any maintenance, then it is reliable. You get that with the PiGate systems. And that is my two cents. Mark KD0QYN On Thursday, May 28, 2020, 10:38:20 AM CDT, Allen <alhiggins@...> wrote:
Mark, When you mentioned about the lockup after days of being on that got me thinking about the OS my past company had that did the same thing. As long as it rebooted every few days all was good. It had to do with when it was always looking for other AP's to mesh with the memory would not dump correctly. Within the firmware (OS) it had a reboot setup . We set it for every night at a late hour and everything ran for years. Something about memory not dumping within the OS. Can this be applied here? We spent $$$$ for the OS and support. They raked the company over the coals. We tried another coder and platform both here in the U.S.A. and we ran into the same memory stacking issue. So go figure. The rebooting worked on both platforms. I just thought if someone wanted to do an experiment on this Direwolf software it might be a work around. Just my 2 cents. Allen Higgins KE8KZO |
