[Xastir] Announcing tile support for OSM

[Jerry Dunmire]

Hi Brett,
I have opened a channel with the OSM sysadmins and their concern is
simply bandwidth. If we stay low enough to avoid notice then there is
no problem, but since I don't know how many xastir users there really
are, I want to stay within the lines (fits my personality too, hi hi).

What someone does as an individual...

Hosting a tile server is a real possibility. When you get a chance,
look through some of the information on the OSM wiki about hosting
tile servers. There is even a simple Amazon EC2 setup. If someone
(you?) were to provide such a server, a new GEO  file is all that is
needed.

You might also consider generating the files directly from the OSM
vector file. The file is large, but the instruction seem pretty clear.

...jerry

On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 9:57 PM, Brett Friermood
<brett.friermood at gmail.com> wrote:
> I looked through the usage policy that Jerry linked to, and see the
> restrictions we're working under.
>
> Knowing that, though, I have a couple thoughts. It mentions bulk
> downloading levels 17 and 18 are forbidden without consulting with
> the system admin beforehand, and also to discuss requirements
> with the system admins to not have access blocked. Not knowing
> for sure, maybe they are actually OK with bulk downloading as long
> as they know?
>
> Maybe the requirements for use in Xastir could be discussed directly
> with the admins. This seems more like a "two year old saying I'm more
> special than you" way of doing things, though. Not the best way to do it
> since the resources would still be the same, limited, only we would be
> hogging more of them.
>
> On the other hand, for heavy users it does mention running your own
> tile server. This seems like a viable solution. I didn't really look closely
> at how that really works, but if some one was running one, then Xastir
> could connect to that instead of the OSM servers.
>
> I had another thought that maybe a single server could be allowed to
> bulk download the tiles, then serve them to Xastir users. This server
> could check for and get the most updated tiles from the "real" tile servers.
> Then all of us could do the same using this server which would take all
> the load off the OSM servers.
>
> It's late, so maybe I'm way off here, but it's a thought. I'm sure something
> could be figured out.
>
> Brett
> KC9MWG
>
>
>
> On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 7:06 PM, Jerry Dunmire <jerry at dunmire.org> wrote:
>> Brett and Curt,
>> The only problem is that bulk downloads are strongly discouraged, and
>> expressly prohibited for some zoom levels, by
>> the OSM tile servers. See the policy at
>> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tile_usage_policy
>>
>> Of course other tile servers may have different policies, and I know
>> of at least one
>> program that appears to violate the policy.
>>
>> Not that I would ever suggest anyone should violate the policy, but I
>> would hope that if they
>> did they would not use the XASTIR user-agent setting.
>>
>> ...jerry
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 4:46 PM, Curt, WE7U <curt.we7u at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Wed, 28 Jul 2010, Brett Friermood wrote:
>>>
>>>> I am wondering, though, if there is a way to download a large area
>>>> of tiles explicitly for offline use?
>>>
>>> I just thought of a sneaky way:  Write a Perl or Python script which
>>> uses xastir_udp_client to send packets into Xastir.  Set up Xastir
>>> to track the object.  Have the object run along the map in a zig-zag
>>> pattern across the area of interest.  Repeat at each zoom level
>>> you're interested in.  That will force caching of the tiles of
>>> interest.  Yea, you can tell I lost too much sleep last night
>>> playing with code...
>>>
>>> Of course it would be easier/more efficient to write a block of code
>>> for Xastir to just snag the tiles over a region and between two zoom
>>> levels.  Or a separate outside program to do the same and then force
>>> Xastir to think it cached them.
>>>
>>> --
>>> Curt, WE7U.                         <http://www.eskimo.com/~archer>
>>>   APRS:  Where it's at!                    <http://www.xastir.org>
>>>  Lotto:  A tax on people who are bad at math. - unknown
>>> Windows:  Microsoft's tax on computer illiterates. - WE7U.
>>> The world DOES revolve around me:  I picked the coordinate system!"
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