On Fri, Nov 17, 2023 at 07:26 AM, Gil Rand wrote:
Ramon, VERY cool! This would appear to be a very painless way to install for people who are less than agile with Linux. The hardening of the OS would be excellent as I had my station fail, and the reason was not readily evident. I am using a Pi 1 with an external soundcard USB dongle, homebrew interface, and a mobile radio to provide a 2-way Igate for my area. I suspect that either there were too many writes to the SD card or a few hard downs messed up the OS. I put the latest OS and Direwolf back on and reconfigured and everything was good again.
Your project, if I understand it correctly, would alleviate some of the down time and simplify an install or re-install.
You could get away from the VOX if you mod a CM-108 for PTT, I'm thinking.
Great work!
Hi Gil,
My experience with aircraft tracking (many GBs of data daily!) is that most of my SD cards, even the "endurance" ones, last a maximum of about 2 years. You can see when they are dieing because the IOWAIT cycles go up dramatically; when you see that you have a very short time to get stuff off ;)
This is one of the reasons that I containerized everything and keep docker configs & persistent data inside a single directory tree (Docker lets you do that easily). For most of my internet-connected station, I do nightly backups (using my Google Drive account for that) of only that portion of the data that is important. That way, rebuilding a Pi and restoring it to the previous state can be done in about 15-20 minutes, including flashing a clean OS onto a SD card.?
As for Docker - it does add a little bit overhead to the system (mainly in disk usage and a minute amount of CPU to manage the containers). What you get back for it, is a quasi-virtualized environment where you can run sets of programs (containers) in their own environment. You don't have to "build" or "create" that container yourself or install software inside of it - this is all done through "pulling" that container and adding your configs to a standard configuration file. (There are options to do many things manually as well, but that's what I tried to avoid!). All you need to do is to tell the system to bring the container "up", and it will take care of the rest for you.
If there are software changes (the container maintainer brings out a new version, etc.), all you need to do is tell the system to "pull" the new version of the container and start it. The management of replacing the old container with the new one, etc. is all done automatically for you.?
As a result, Docker is ideal for running a bunch of disparate things on a single machine at the same time, without these things interfering with each other. It's also ideal for "maintaining" your software, since upgrading to new versions is done by a simple "docker compose pull" command.?
A good friend of mine wrote a primer on how to do things with Docker. It's focused on creating aircraft ADSB receivers and feeding that data to FlightAware, FR24, and a bunch of other aggregators, however it's a great thing to read up on even if you don't want to do that:?
Enough about Docker and code development -- I need to start reading up on the CM108 PTT thing and how to make a simple interface between my Baofeng (POS) handheld and the sound card. I'm using the APRS-K2 cable now, and as expected, the TXTail is atrocious.
--Ramon kx1t, Belmont MA, USA
