16 Apr
2021
16 Apr
'21
4:44 a.m.
On 4/16/21 7:58 AM, Toussaint OTTAVI via 44Net wrote:
Le 15/04/2021 à 18:15, Rob PE1CHL via 44Net a écrit :
Well I deliberately did not touch on that sensitive subject... it is unfortunate that the
system is rather closed, but it is how it is.
The protocols are kind of standard (RTMP/RTCMP) and it has been reverse engineered, e.g.
by SM0SVX who made the SVXlink repeater controller which has Echolink support, and also
the Qtel echolink client.
But they are not really the same thing, e.g. the directory server fetches by the original
software are compressed and take less traffic than the SVX implementation. I think this
is determined also by the version number (the server recognizes if the client can do
compression by comparing the version number).
I will explain things here on the list as there
may be other people wondering about this...
Wow ! What can I say more than : "Thank you very much" :-) You provided in one
message all the answers I didn't find in the Echolink documentation, HI :-)
In fact, I never managed to get my personal callsign registered at Echolink, and
that's one of the reasons reason why I don't really enjoy "closed
source" and "closed networks" :-) But it's just a personal opinion, HI
:-) As far as some of our users do enjoy Echolink, my job is to provide network access :-)
Yesterday, when trying to troubleshoot a problem with our Asterisk / app_rpt /
chan_echolink, I noticed that, when selecting "auto proxy" on the client, I was
redirected to 44.190.8.180 (VK3JED), with a ping of 256ms (Hello Tony, are your proxies
using "long path", HI ?)
What made me think about installing some local proxy :-)
Yes that is a bit funny, it appears the geolocation service sometimes fails
dramatically. I also have many users from all over the world on our system.
The client fetches the proxy list (echolink.org/proxylist.jsp) and picks a
"Ready" proxy at some small random offset near the top.
Normally you should see local proxies at the top of the list. Here I do. But apparently
this does not always work.
Anyway, reading your clear explanation, I think it would be a waste of public IPs. AFAIK,
I can install some "local proxies" and point my users specifically to them. But
it's not possible to make "local relays" and restrict them to my local
users. And I don't have network resources for providing WW relays. Then, as far as our
BGP gateway for 44.190 addresses is in Paris, and most French public ISP traffic (even
from our island of Corsica) goes through Paris, it seems clever to use existing
proxies/relays in Europe, and in the Netherlands (which is very near from Paris in terms
of ping).
Well, in my opinion the use of a couple hundred or a few thousand of our
public IP addresses for this purpose, which although it is a closed system is really an
amateur radio related application, is not too bad. Of course when you have a 44.190/24
network and you use it for other things as well it may be that way, but we use 256 out of
our 65536 addresses in 44.137.0.0/16 and I think that is fine. Even in 44.190 I think you
could apply for another /24 when you would desire to do that.
However, there already are quite some proxies these days (it was quite different before I
made this software, there were not many of those sites with 200 proxies because that
required a ridiculous amount of resources, still there are some who apparently are not
aware of the alternative).
Running "local relays" is only possible when you can run a DNS for them, which
usually is impractical on internet and while it is possible to do that on net-44 it is not
very useful because there your users can work without NAT when they desire and thus
require no relay or proxy.
Then, the remaining question is :
When using Echolink Android client, and selecting "Auto proxy" settings, why
does it select VK3JED and not PE1CHL ?
See above. I think it is a failure of the geolocation. That can be either because
you or VK3JED are not "correctly" registered in Maxmind or because it was
updated recently and Echolink has not loaded that update yet (one needs to download a
database at some interval, it is not a dynamically queried system).
When I started routing 44.137.0.0/16 on internet, I filled in some form at Maxmind and
some weeks later the location was correctly registered in their system. But that was over
5 years ago and by now that location has propagated everywhere.
Rob