[App_rpt-users] AllStarLink News and Updates

[AllStarLink Admin Role]

We here at AllStarLink are not always best at publishing what the
organization is up to.  There's lots of great things happening, some more
visible than others.  Below is a bit of what we've been up to since the
AllStar project was turned over to us.

AllStarLink has assembled team of around a dozen volunteer admin/support
experts to troubleshoot any possible AllStar infrastructure problems, process
node and user ID requests, improve and bug fix ASL, attempt to keep up with
end user support and pay the bills. Our team has identified and fixed every
issue which has been brought to our attention. There is always room for
improvement and we're continually working to this end.

We are improving the current infrastructure to eliminate single points of
failure.  There are new geo-redundant registration servers in test with a
clustered database backend.  DNS has been migrated to this cluster of servers
and has been running without fail for months.  As AllStar supports a diverse
userbase; many running older distributions at remote sites who desire
stability, our admin team must operate with stability as the highest
priority. As such we cannot make sweeping changes to critical network
infrastructure without extensive testing.

The registration and database servers have uptimes approaching a year, and
have been continually available during this time.  These servers are
responsible for the nodes list, which is distributed to redundant public
facing servers and on to users AllStar nodes.  Even in the event of an outage
during maintenance, the node list simply stops updating for a time.  While
inconvenient to nodes registering during this window, the vast majority of
nodes are still able to link with this older node list.

Our admin team has built a new stats server and are working on a new portal.
By the way, we have been successfully processing ID and node requests on this
new portal for months and have received very positive feedback on its new
node list.  We added a new node map and performance improvements to the stats
server.  MediaWiki has been installed with advanced search, a WYSIWYG editor,
and other plugins, enabling anyone to create or update documentation.  The
Drupal site at docs.allstarlink.org is migrating as editors time permits.
Our distribution has been updated including ASL 1.01 to run on the latest OS
and has many improvements.  More improvements are under active development.

We're always open to assistance, whether it be design work, admin/support
team help, or a completely new feature created by a code contributor.  It's
easy to get involved at any level.

In closing we want to stress that if you have a problem with AllStar servers
or want to help out in any way, please let us know by posting to the
app_rpt-users list.  That's the best way to insure the fastest response.


AllStarLink, Inc.

Directors:
Kevin Custer, W3KKC
Pete Elke, WI6H
Bryan Fields, W9CR
Tim Sawyer, WD6AWP