[aprssig] Tier 2 Status

[Steve Dimse]

On Jun 21, 2006, at 7:57 PM, AE5PL Lists wrote:

> There are over 5,000 stations (IGates, clients, and servers) directly
> connected to APRS-IS.

Ummm, this number seems awfully high. How do you arrive at this? In  
the last hour, the number of position reports received by findU is  
9233. This includes objects, weather warnings, and earthquakes.  
Granted, not all hubs send position reports, but even if you want to  
say there are 800 tier two and lower hubs out there, to claim that  
one out of every two stations on APRS is and internet station is  
pretty far-fetched. If it were true, all the accusations I've  
received over the years that my merging amateur radio with the  
internet would be the death of ham radio have been proven correct ;-)

> Simply put: if everyone tried to connect to the 3
> core servers, the Tier 1 servers have neither the bandwidth to handle
> that nor would they be able to "load-share" to 2 servers if one of the
> servers goes down (maintenance, moves, etc.).  Because of the mesh
> design of the core servers, the complexity of maintaining more than 4
> core servers becomes unmanageable with each server run by independent
> sysops

To add each server to the core, a new person would need to edit their  
config file to match a template, and start the javAPRSrvr program.  
Adding a fourth core server means the existing three people need to  
add one line to their config files and restart the program on their  
server. Adding the fifth means now four people need to add a line.  
Adding the tenth (at which point the core would support your 5000  
connections) means nine people add one line. This does not seem like  
an intractable management problem to me!

> and getting then necessary OC-3 pipes with high pps routers
> donated is unlikely as well.

I disagree strongly with this statement. As I said, I have had no  
problems getting such sites donated every time I have asked. There  
are a lot of APRS users that control sites with fat pipes.

Steve