Quick Notes on ASL3 in Docker

AllStarLink
1

So over the weekend I decided to undertake the task of seeing if I could get ASL3 working in Docker. There's a lot of conflicting information from everyone...which is common in the ham world and is going to be the thing that brings this to a broken smashed circle. This is not going to be a HOWTO, it's not going to be in-depth. It's mostly a dump of my thoughts and notes I made while attempting to deploy this that might help someone else in the future should they decide. Host is a LibreComputer LePotato running the vendor built Debian 12 image. This is basically a Pi3B+ class device.

The Docker build in the ASL3 repository works. Mostly. Currently the Dockerfile isn't going to pull an base image as $ARCH/debian:13-slim is no longer the proper way of doing it. This is fixed by not passing $ARCH at all...and is probably something I can submit as a PR. I built it using a 13-slim container on a Debian 12 host with no problems.

  • The snd-pcm-oss snd-mixer-oss kernel modules need to be loaded on the host. My vendor didn't load them by default. That was a fun 2 hours.
  • There are reasons to not run privileged mode; but I didn't get far enough to determine if it was really needed here. That being said it'll avoid a lot of permissions issues with /dev/dsp and isn't much worse than running it baremetal.
  • asl-menu, naturally, is built around systemd - so can't restart asterisk but you restart the container. That's the only complaint it has.

So...I was expecting far more notes and issues; but those were the only things I had related to actually getting ASL3 running. I had a lot of fun getting an Allscan container built....however since I never got the node functional I have no clue if it did anything but load config.

Ultimately I was trying to use AIOC cables...they're not going to work. People say they do...but I've got six radios here and I get the same failure every time; and it's one that everyone points to the solutions that haven't worked for me and even has Fable confused. I can manually buzz the audio with my finger and VCOS works fine. The minute I plug it in to a radio VCOS quits working. Oh..it detects audio...it just doesn't hold VCOS on. But you pull it out of the radio and it functions fine. I'm just done with 'em.

2

3.10.x release will no longer need OSS to connect to the audio. That maybe helpful.
The container will still need to connect to the USB device to access the GPIO...

3

Any PRs to improve the Docker situation would be welcome. There's low use of ASL in Docker or Podman, but there is some small instances of it. It just doesn't get a lot of attention.

4

Yes, I've read that will be coming soon; which will be good. None of the OSS stuff will matter. I have a dmr hotspot already containerized using GPIO. As well as one for an OpenGD radio on USB.

I might have to convert my primary node over to docker then since the hardware I had for the planned one isn't going to work out. I'm not exactly a docker fan...but I got this far with it. Plus it did make tunneling it over my particular VPN setup much less tedious.