Can an ASL3 hub be setup on a physical Debian 12 computer on my residential Internet service that has a DHCP public IP address? My public IP address is not static, do my public IP address periodically changes. Does the AllStarLink network discover when a hub on the AllStarLink network changes it’s public IP address? How long does it take for the AllStarLink network to learn the new public IP address? A static public address is not available with my residential Internet service. If I want to have a static public address, I have to switch from residential Internet service to more expensive business Internet service.
I ran into problems setting up my XLX941 DMR and YSF Reflector on my residential Internet service that has a DHCP public IP address. I also ran into problems connecting to my XLX941 DMR and YSF Reflector on my local area network. Those problems were solved by putting the XLX941 DMR and YSF Reflector on a Linode Debian cloud computer that has a static IP address. I prefer to run the ASL3 hub on a physical Debian computer on my residential Internet with a DHCP public IP address if it’s possible to do.
There are lots of questions in your post but the short answer is “Yes, you can run an ASL3 node in your home with residential Internet service”.
If all you care about is connecting to remote nodes then all should “just work”.
If you also want to support connections from Internet nodes to your node then you need to make sure the local IP address of your node does not change (e.g. set a static IP on your node) and you need to setup the port forwarding rules on your router so that the Internet traffic will be forwarded to your node.
If I run an ASL3 hub, where stations connect to the ASL3 hub, how does the AllStarLink network know the public IP address of the ASL3 hub, if the DHCP public address periodically changes? Is there a mechanism in the AllStarLink network where the nodes periodically “call home” or some other method, do that the AllStarLink network knows the ASL3 hub’s IP address? I’m assuming that the AllStarLink network needs to know the public IP address of each node. Setting up the hub on a static local area network is easy. But I suspect that having a DHCP public IP address might be a problem. I’m assuming that when my internet provider changes my public IP address, then the AllStarLink network will not know the new public IP address.
When your node comes online and registers, the ip is recorded and distributed to other nodes who are also registered.
If your ip changes, no other node will know how to properly connect until this is corrected.
But that does not stop you from connecting to other nodes as long as you are registered.
You could write a script to watch for change in ip and re-register.
OR
You could use Dynamic DNS for a changing ip which is tied to a name server whose ip pointer is changed/updated on the fly as needed. There are free services out there and you can also do this yourself if you run a server with a DNS.
ASL registers your node number’s IP address periodically. I think it’s every 300 seconds by default. So, if your IP address changes, your node will update soon after.
Generally speaking, if you can have a hub on a static IP, especially if it is a high traffic one, that will work better, but if your IP address doesn’t change extremely frequently (mine only changes once every 6 to 9 months, for example) then it’s probably not a huge deal.
That’s great information about solutions for the DHCP public IP address problem. I could write a script to check the current public IP address and determine if the current IP address was recently changed by the Internet service provider. I would then periodically run that script. The one issue that I would have is knowing the command line string to force the AllStarLink hub node to register with the AllStarLink network. Does anyone know the command line string to force the AllStarLink node to register with the AllStarLink network?
You are over-thinking this. If your home router has acquired an IP address (via DHCP from your internet provider) then you will keep that IP address until you lose power or your ISPs network goes down for an extended time. In either of those cases, your node will have lost connectivity. When the connectivity is restored your node will register again using the current (possibly new) IP.
No need for all that. Registration happens automatically at intervals. If the public IP address changes, the next time your node registers, the new IP address is used.
Registration in ASL3 is handled automatically by app.rpt using the credentials in /etc/asterisk/rpt_http_registrations.conf.