[App_rpt-users] More than 4 nodes on a PC

[Doug Crompton]

Allstar works fine on Debian. There is no official release but I have had it running on both Debain and Ubuntu here. Ubuntu is not recommended as it requires a kernel recompile and with its frequent upgrade it is almost guaranteed it would overwrite the kernel at some point. I don't see the bottleneck being USB speed but rather inefficient coding of the USB channel driver that could be corrected. This is not a criticism of the code as it was written to the standards of USB at the time and things have changed considerably both in hardware and software. 

Allstar also works well in Archlinux as we have done on the Beagle Bone Black which brings up another point for multiple nodes - multiple Beagle Blacks. The downside is the management of multiple servers but the upside is redundancy. If one went out the others would remain operational as opposed to the PC which would take out the entire system if it went down. I know of at least one system using four blacks mounted on a board with individual USB fobs. Add a four port ethernet switch, four wall warts and you have a four node system. Total cost about $250 using your own modified FOBS.  
73 Doug
WA3DSP
http://www.crompton.com/hamradio


> Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2015 17:36:48 -0500
> From: Bryan at bryanfields.net
> To: app_rpt-users at ohnosec.org
> Subject: Re: [App_rpt-users] More than 4 nodes on a PC
> 
> On 1/20/15, 1:30 PM, Cole Cunningham wrote:
> > We’re looking at app_rpt for sites with up to eight radios, all currently
> > controlled by a RLC-3.  Our initial approach is to use a PC and try to run all
> > eight radios off of it.  For testing we’re using modified fobs running on USB
> > 2.0 ports and when we try to use more than four, things break up, sound bad,
> > etc.  I’ve found that CentOS 5 that comes on the ACID disk doesn’t support USB
> > 3.0, which we were thinking might offer more bandwidth and handle the added fobs.
> 
> The usb2 devices on the usb3 bus will slow the bus to usb2 speeds (assuming
> it's the first connected device, no way to control this upon cold boot).  So
> you'll not gain much.
> 
> If you have squelch/COR control in the radios, two of the quad pci cards would
> work well.  You can still find motherboards with pci slots, or use a converter
> to pcie. The cards are under $75/port, it's hard to go wrong with this.
> 
> The other option if you don't have squelch is RTCM's all feeding over IP to
> the server.  That way the server would not need anything special (other than a
> multi-core cpu)
> 
> The USB FOB's are nice, but they don't scale nicely (IMO).
> 
> As to getting the Allstar version of asterisk working on a newer distro, I
> believe all you need to do for this is use dahdi and the dahdi patches and
> then compile from source.  I have it running under debian squeeze with out
> dahdi, but I plan to build another box running wheezy and try the dahdi
> patches.  Can anyone correct me if I'm wrong (or a +1 if I'm right) about this?
> 
> 
> -- 
> Bryan Fields
> 
> 727-409-1194 - Voice
> 727-214-2508 - Fax
> http://bryanfields.net
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