I have been playing with my Allstar node and I love how it operates.
Something I wish it would do is create a backup IMG of the entire SD card running the node and reduced the size of the file (not a clone of the entire SD card), ready to be "burned" into a new SD card.
Similar to installing WPSD on a new SD card.
I also wish Allstar image on a new card would create it's own wifi network for initial setup similar to WPSD. This reduces friction for new users when setting it up.
I clearly don't know what it would take to make this work/happen but I thought I would put it out there for smarter people to consider.
Thank you to this great community for creating a phenomenal platform.
I was checking on the community posts and noticed no comments on my post, not sure if folks are not interested on such feature or it is a "pie in the sky" thought.
Supporting some sort of "Auto AP" system on the ASL3 Appliance is on the list of future improvements. Just hasn't bubbled to the top of the list yet.
As for a small "ready to burn" image, that's more complicated than you might think and would require special tooling on your system rather than an ASL system. However I'm also not aware of WPSD having an image-based backup. Tey have a generalized backup-and-restore configuration just like AllStarLink has. Can you list what you're referring to about WPSD?
Thank you for the response, I am excited to heard about the Auto AP feature that could remove some friction for new users.
I guess my comment about WPSD wasn't quite clear or I got terms mixed up, my apologies. I was thinking about the fresh image of WPSD and how a backup is easily restored:
Burn a fresh Image
Run it for the first time, go to the "restore" feature. Reboot and tada... users like me can easily undo things that got me into trouble in the first place.
I tried to install DVswitch on my "healthy running" allstar node and things went haywire and it stopped working beyond my limited knowledge. When I tried going into the ASL menu and restore a backup image I was somehow able to "restore" from a backup file but the errors didn't go away.
DVSwitch is not ASL3 software nor is it supported by ASL so the ASL Backup system won't backup DVSwitch components. You'd have to follow whatever backup directions they provide. However for a stock ASL3 system, the asl-backup process will store your node backups on the ASL portal for easy recovery.
After making configuration changes you use the asl-menu to bring up the Backup and Restore Menu. Use the Create a node backup option and then say Yes to Would you also like to save this backup to ....
Later, when you need to start fresh, you go follow the normal steps to install a new image. Then, when you use asl-menu you again bring up the Backup and Restore Menu but this time you choose the Restore node from "backup.allstarlink.org" backups option.
I use PiShrink to reduce the image after creating an image file from the SD card. I run PiShrink in WSL on Windows, but any OS that can run the bash script with pre-requisite Linux apps should work. Be sure to understand how this works to expand the image on boot using rc.local after booting on a new SD card install. github.com/Drewsif/PiShrink
Well, Macs are still FreeBSD under the covers, no?
So yu can do this as long as you can open a terminal, and either use a pipe or compress the .img file using xz later. You'll probably need to build the xz utils from source, though.
