[Xastir] APRS Servers and verified connections

[Gerry Creager]

If any of you have been wondering why you've not been getting into the 
APRS-IS Core servers with reports, or weather, we made a change last 
weekend.

In one of the poorest times I think I've ever picked for a server 
change, we changed all 3 Core servers to align with what the Tier2 folks 
decided to do several months ago:  Require all connections be verified. 
  I refer the interested student to the 'callpass' program for "How do I 
find a passcode" questions.

The purpose? To push forward the separation of CWOP and APRS-IS traffic. 
  CWOP now has its own servers and they're really doing nicely.  APRS-IS 
has its own, comprising the Core and the Tier2 folks, and several 
others.  Last January, as a consequence of Davis Instruments selling a 
bunch of weather stations, we saw a spike in Packets/sec on the APRS-IS 
servers (hosting CWOP), with poor performance, dropped connections and 
dropped packets and other server-overload problems.After a bit of 
analysis it became obvious that the frequency of updates, and the 
predisposition of weather to align themselves with other stations for 
observations every 5 min or so, was slamming our APRS-IS servers.

We found some volunteers to run dedicated CWOP servers and stabilized 
the Core server situation after some potential problems, and started the 
painful process of getting CWOP members (non-hams, that is) to move over 
to the cwop.aprs.net rotation, and the Hams to connect to 
rotate.aprs.net as before

FindU connects to all the APRS-IS Core and all the CWOP servers to 
gather its data.  The backup FindU server does the same thing.  There's 
a CWOP aggregation server that does the same thing, again.

If anyone wants to see all weather stations on a map (think "Sea of 
Blue") they can point Xastir toward cwop.tamu.edu Port 30001 and see the 
stations pop up.

Questions? Comments?
Thanks, Gerry
-- 
Gerry Creager -- gerry.creager at tamu.edu
Texas Mesonet -- AATLT, Texas A&M University	
Cell: 979.229.5301 Office: 979.458.4020 FAX: 979.862.3983
Office: 1700 Research Parkway Ste 160, TAMU, College Station, TX 77843