Curious about RepeaterPhone "public authentication"

1

I’m on Android but curious about the iOS app RepeaterPhone.

I spoke to a ham on 80m and he mentioned talking to friends in Santa Barbara K6TZ club using ASL and this app yet he has no node or account on another node. I think he does have a node number but I cannot locate his call sign in the nodes list.

The app description says-
" AllStarLink Support
Connect to AllStarLink nodes using public authentication or node-specific credentials"

How does this work?

73-
Clifford - KK6QMS

2

I believe he is using an attachment to the web transceiver but I could be wrong.

You need to contact the App’s support with questions.

You have always been able to do something similar using a sip phone app directly to the node/server. After all, the system rides on a phone PBX.

3

I use Zoiper to implement what Mike just suggested,

Bob
K6ECM

4

Reaching out to the author of the software is the best bet to get app specific information, I can tell you that all RepeaterPhone needs is a valid allstarlink web portal account in order to work. To use, you simply supply the web portal credentials to the app and viola, you are online and ready to go.

Hope that helps.

Jim, K6JWN

5

Hi, RepeaterPhone developer here.

There are generally three ways to authenticate when connecting to an AllStarLink node:

  1. DNS based authentication. When nodes come online, they register themselves with the ASL DNS system. When one node A requests to connect to node B, node B will query DNS for the details about node A. If the details match, node A is considered authenticated and trusted to connect.

  2. IAX local authentication. In this scheme, an IAX client presents a username and password that must match credentials that are configured in the ASL config file. If the credentials match, the client is authenticated and may connect.

  3. IAX “allstar-public” authentication. Also called “web transceiver” This is a variation on the username and password above. However, instead of the individual user credentials being stored locally in the ASL config file, the IAX client logs in to the allstarlink.org website and obtains a token. Then, when the client connects to a node, it presents the user’s callsign and token. The node will query allstarlink.org to see if the credentials are valid. If the query is successful, the client is authenticated and may connect.

RepeaterPhone supports the latter 2 mechanisms. The ‘allstar-public’ method is the most convenient for a lot of users because, since the verification authority (allstarlink.org) is centralized, it doesn’t require the node admins to manually add an entry for everyone that might want to connect.

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