Hi!
Looking back to my original love for AllstarLink with the DSP processing of the COR and Tone with USBRadio, and looking back at how stable was 2 node running on a 2.4GHz P4 running the ACID distro.
I want to go back to running a real PC. tired of RaspberryPi power supply instability and the lack of DSP audio that works well. My 2 URI-X on 2 rpi is neet, but I would like them better on one server with DSP.
I know, pc have fans that can fail. Yes like rpi have power supply that do fail also.
PC have hard drive that can fail. with SSD, that is less true. An SD card on RPI do fail also.
Power supply fan can fail. But if you have a large enough power supply for a low consomption PC, you wont need fan. Or you can have multiple casing fan and even if you have one fail the whole thing wont burn in flame in a few days.
So where do I start from to do a nice install of a micro ATX machine with a I5 and 8 gig of ram and a 250 gig solid state drive? Is there a how to? What version of debian is recommended? Is there an install script for the latest stable version? , could be RC level to.
I can only speak to my personal experience.
1st know that I have been running intel atom mini pc board for nearly 10 years.
2.4ghz and 4gb of ram (max) for the repeater system and has 3 repeaters and a MMDVM not really in use much.
It has no fan. But if it were in a hash temp environment, I probably would want one on it somewhere.
I have a 12v power supply system that really needs to be heavier for all that I am running so I switched to a ac pwr supply. It is a mini/micro atx format board.
I believe the model I’m using was out of production 8 years ago but you can still find them on ebay.
D2700MUD
It has a hard parallel port as well if you don’t want to hack up a fob.
I have never been fond of a Pi for repeater use. It is not really cheaper as well for what you get.
They are great for many things, but just not quite enough for me.
This ATOM can run months in high activity without issue/reboot as long as your OS security is tight and you leave no loose ends in your config.
Mine still uses asl-1.01 installed from iso.
I have no suggestion, just shared experience.
The only reason I moved from ACID, the OS (centos5) was not supported and my scripts both in OS and asterisk were of different versions from my voip system and ham servers so I made them one in the same when I switched so everything was the same command wise. And I found ways to work around the shortfalls in these older versions we use with my scripts.
As I will be using that micro ATX machine for the next 10 years hopefully, I will be looking for something current so I will have parts available for some more time . But thanks for the info.
What OS are you running now? even if you went from the ISO install it is possible to upgrade the version just by some lines in apt source. Did you upgraded? If so had any problem?
I know that Dadhi is a problem when upgrading the Kernel and we need to use the DKMS for that driver to still work. But I am pretty sure it bugs on the latest Kernels. (6.0+) if I am not crazy.
And as you said, security need to be tight, so uptodate kernels and pkg is a must. (and good firewalls rules)
BTW we (as a community) never had much of a large discussion on hardening our allstarlinks machine around here, bt some threads from time to time. This should be put in to a wiki. Or is it already done and I did not seen it?
Thanks for the reply. Still need to find the best path to use, start with the ISO and upgrade up to X version of the OS or go on another path.
But was nice to know I am not the only one that wish to go back to real computer hardware.
ASL-1.01
Yes, just updated the apt source to buster
Update/upgrade twice a year. No issues.
To be honest, you don’t need a lot of cpu. I needed more memory for the external things I do with the system and not effect asterisk. I think I would get by with 1.6ghz dual core with the extra junk I run.
No modern board is going to include a parallel port.
But you can add one if it has expansion slot. USB to parallel can not be bit banged so that is not an option.
Nobody really makes a board for more than 2 years anymore, if even that long. And memory changes just as fast. I can still buy memory for the atom as it uses laptop memory. It’s dirt cheap and I have lots of extra. Used a 12gb ssd at first but since changed to a 16gb. I have a 8TB network redundant drive if I need more. It now uses ssd’s as well.
There is nothing else changeable on the board and I have several of them. Mem & drive.
My original system for asl was a 2.1ghz dual core with 8gb but it and my like voip system were energy hogs that did not sit well in my solar house running 24/7 with the remote link radio’s and remote bases then. You count watts closely when you don’t seem to have enough in the winter LOL.
But I don’t have that issue anymore either. I replace the panels after 20 years and doubled the capacity+.
But the atom remains. Never had an issue with them.
I don’t think it matters which asl version you use, but I would stay on one of the beaten paths with it and OS unless you like to discover new issues with new hardware and our old software.
What fits my needs is not going to be right for others.
I should add since you have interest in newer hardware, you might want to stay away from ‘using’ usb3.0 with more than one URI. Use the 2.0 ports unless you have no choice.
I don’t think our software is able to handle the change in format of addressing.
But I could be wrong.
Good to know you’ve been able to upgrade to Buster.
Your last comment on the USB3, they could be a problem? I dont understand how they could as a USB3 port need to be back compatible to USB2 and even USB1.1 I do understand that there could be incompatibilities with some devices, but never heard of such things with URI-X.
The driver for the kernel is not the same as the USB2 one, but that is at the hardware/kernel level our software run at the software/kernel level.
The software will make calls to the kernel that will handle the calls to the hardware through the kernels module/driver.
So I don’t see how they could be a problem. Those driver can handle much higher communication speed than USB2.
Since I use URI-X and dont plan on using fob that I would need to mod I dont need parallel port. Even more, I want to use the DSP function of the software. So I would not need to mod much on a fob as I would only need the PTT, usually it is already available on a led.
Since you say that you can run allstarlink easily, I wonder if we could run a windows 10 VM inside the Buster machine. That way I could access the programming of the 3 repeaters on site. 2 XPR and a quantar. the quantar is a 900 MHz for allstarlink, a XPR8400 run on UHF DMR, and the other one run allstarlink on UHF also. That could even be a better setup that I was hoping to achieve.
You are correct but that was not the problem I was addressing. It was addressing the number our software used to address the correct port where URI is plunged in is a different format. Not that it is inferior.
Kinda the same issue with a Pi4. Perhaps see how those folks get by with more than one URI on USB3.
I don’t think they do.
As I see it, (perhaps incorrectly?) the address lines reported by lsusb are not the same.
I don’t see a fix for it till someone writes/adjusts the software.
Traditionally and what the software is expecting is a simple line like 2-3.1 or 1-2.1
1st# being the usb header and the 2nd# being the device on that header.
usb3 will show all headers as 1-1.x
Guessing that all are handled by one interrupt and handler for that interrupt. Could be wrong about that as well. It is a guess. I don’t spend any time on it. I use usb 2 or 1.1.
I would not want to guess if you can run a VM in or over our system.
I never tried it. No reason.I have plenty of old machines to do lessor tasks.
Just try to use the most power for the least consumption.
I certainly don’t want a repeater to go down because I am having issues with windows.
But I realize most systems anymore are personal stations.
It’s just a matter of having enough resources when needed. CPU,MEM,net bandwidth and the overhead in managing it. I have never had any ‘long term success’ trying to do such things.
Just complicates things when there is an issue to track down.
I am sure someone out there will chime in on the subject of VM’s.
. But thanks for the info.