About 10 weeks ago, I put a very crude method of insuring that the gateways were all linked to REF034C, so that we had a fully-connected network of repeaters for the NEFL-DStar Network – and I do mean VERY CRUDE. Every hour, on the half, I issued a link command to connect to REF034C (same as issuing REF034CL in the URCALL field, if you were doing it on the RF side).
Crude, but it worked – if the gateway was already connected to ANYTHING, it would simply respond-back with “Link Already Established”. If the link was idle, it would connect to REF034C and respond with “Link Established”.
There was a downside – every hour, on the half – you would usually hear “Link Already Established” – quite annoying. Okay – it’s functional, but certainly not elegant (hey – I TOLD YOU I was a Linux knucklhead..!!).
It’s only been a couple of weeks since Jason Price (W4LTL) graciously took over the management of the D-Star Gateways for us. It has been a big relief, since he is a Unix/Linux professional by trade, as well as being a sponge to all things D-Star.
Well, Jason has changed all of that. Wednesday evening, he developed a method of actually checking for the link status – then if idle, it would link to the default REF034C – if active, it would just terminate QUIETLY. He tested it late Wednesday evening and has it working now.
Following is the email exchange from that night.. KUDOS to Jason… this is GREAT STUFF..!!!!
Above: “Linker” – explanation of how it works (click to enlarge)
#1 by Mark KV4I on 2010/08/27 - 12:19
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Mike,
I probably know less about *nix shell scripting than you and Jason do but it appears that the line
CHECK=$(/bin/grep “REF” /dstar/tmp/status |awk ‘{print $5}’)
only checks for the existence of a Reflector link and not the REF034CL reflector link.
It looks like this script assumes that any current reflector link is the desired one. That’s fine it you want to leave other reflector links active. However, if the intention is to change any existing link to REF034CL does this script accomplish that objective?
#2 by Mike Lee on 2010/08/27 - 14:13
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You are correct – if the link is connected to ANYTHING, we will not disturb it (since there could be a conversation in progress).
No worries – Jason has the situation well in hand
Mike
#3 by Mark KV4I on 2010/08/27 - 15:35
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I’m sure he does. Thanks for the information and the opportunity to learn more about the system and how it responds.