Odroid XU4 Beta image posted

[ZL2TWS]

Hi Andrew

Yes you can use /root and I do use /root however after updates an IP address is added that is wrong for me in /usr/local/etc.
We have two gateways in Wellington that use the same gateway call sign, ZL2VH. One is a G3 and the other is ircDDB.
G3 uses an Icom RP-2000 repeater and ircDDB uses an Icom RP-4000 repeater. The custom DPlus_Hosts.txt
held in the /root file is used to connect to the G3 gateway and the IP for the gateway operated from my QTH uses the local router IP.
The repeaters are at a high altitude site of 867 mASL. G3 has a 5GHz WiFi link to it and the ircDDB uses a remote RF UHF link to access.
The DPlus_Hosts.txt is written with the ircDDB version IP address and Pi-Star uses that instead of the /root DPlus_Hosts.txt file.
The reason is that the G3 Gateway is not added to the Pi-Star DPlus_Hosts.txt and only the ircDDB version.
The /root entries work perfectly for DExtra_Hosts.txt and DCS_Hosts.txt but not in the DPlus cases.
My personal preference is to manage the /usr/local/etc host files myself and delete many that have errors and entries I'll never use.
IP addresses with errors, cannot be found for example slow the boot time of the Pi-Star while checking, pings are done and eventually
load the host files and Pi-star can be used. A minimal host file list allows a faster boot.

My situation is one I like to self manage and happy to continue with my work around but in case you get inquiries from others wanting more control over the host files this discussion was posted for review. I have been using D-Star since 2011, built many hotspot versions such as VK4TUX, Maryland, WesternDstar, a repeater trustee and actively publish D-Star articles to promote use and help others building hotspots. https://zl2vh.org.nz/d-star/ and https://zl2vh.org.nz/repeaters/

Thanks for your reply and 73, John ZL2TWS

[M1DNS]

Fare reply. Yours does seem a unique situation. There is another little trick in that you can lock the ip address using L within the root files, so the updates won't over ride it.

eg. ZL2VH 192.168.1.3 L

But I don't want to take away futhur from ur request, so will leave that one for anyone else who might be looking at doing stuffs with the hosts files.



Sent via smoke signals using my SM-G960F

[ZL2TWS]

Hello Andrew

I'm following up about my request 2) and if would be possible to make the change.
Here is the request re-posted from above:

Request 2) This relates to MMDVM mode: I have a few stations wanting to connect to my Pi-Star but I notice that on the dashboard, bottom lower left, that D-Star Network will only show one call sign at any time. If an already connected out going call sign is displayed then that gets replaced by the incoming call sign. If an incoming call sign is displayed and an out going is linked then it replaces the incoming call sign. The only way to view the the status of incoming and outgoing is to login to Admin. It would be nice to see the D-Star link information displayed on the dashboard page as seen on the Admin page. I can see that there is no room to display more than one link on the bottom left in the D-Star network box. It is referred to as "D-Star Network" on the dashboard and "D-Star Link Information" on the Admin page. If you want me to experiment then we can modify the XU4 image and do beta testing and if it's accepted as a useful change then push to the Pi version. I note that the DStarRepeater dashboard version does display "D-Star Link Information" as also seen on the Admin page so I'm asking that the same be seen with the MMDVM dashboard version.

Thanks for your time with this and think myself the above might be useful but accept that you might prefer to leave things untouched for good reasons I have not thought of yet. 73 and good DV. John ZL2TWS