And my point was that is should be an AMPR/ARDC project that's maintained and moved
forward by ARDC. It shouldn't just be a one-person Github repo.
-----Original Message-----
From: 44Net <44net-bounces+jason=mfamily.org(a)mailman.ampr.org> On
Behalf Of David McGough via 44Net
Sent: Tuesday, August 3, 2021 3:15 PM
To: Rob PE1CHL via 44Net <44net(a)mailman.ampr.org>
Cc: David McGough <kb4fxc(a)inttek.net>
Subject: Re: [44net] On Allocations, PoPs, and Proposals
Rob, I already do this (
https://hamvoip.org)! I fully understand the
concerns.
On Tue, 3 Aug 2021, Rob PE1CHL via 44Net wrote:
Well yes, it is probably "easy to
do". But you need to be aware that you
get into a commitment that you need
to sustain for many years. It is
doable to make a downloadable image for the Raspberry Pi and maybe some
config screen to set it up, and put it on a website, but after some time the
software gets outdated, new models of Pi appear that require or prefer
a new kernel, the Raspbian gets updated, etc.
A good example is HamServerPi, a ready-made image with some hamradio
oriented services which was published around 6 years ago. I downloaded
that, put it on SD card, installed it in a Raspberry Pi 1 and played a bit with
it. Nice. It was based on the first Raspbian (Debian Wheezy I think).
I am not really using it as I have a PC running Linux all the time.
Recently I had mail contact with someone who was still running it.
He wanted to do some new things but there were missing dependencies.
Now, this project has been abandoned. No new images were published
anymore. The user was not really a Linux noob so I explained him how
in principle one can update Debian to the next version, and he did that
and stepped to the next version (Jessie). That went well, although it of
course was quite some work to process all edits of config files, and he had
an issue with a package no longer supported. Fixed all that. Now the
next step, but that failed completely. Too many problems.
(I have done this on PC systems and I know that it requires quite some
attention and skills)
So now such a user is at a dead end: they can go back to the saved card
image and run outdated software forever and no longer be able to do new
things, or they have to re-invent the whole wheel (download recent OS
image for the Pi and then install all the wanted packages and configure
them).
At that time the advantage of having a prepared install is lost completely,
works even against you as you have no knowledge of what was exactly
done to make that and what you should do to re-create it.
So when you make that shiny SD card image today which creates the router
with current software, you have to be aware that you have the moral
obligation to track the developments of the OS and hardware and keep
releasing new versions about once a year, or you will leave your happy
users behind in frustration.
Then, it may not be that easy after all.
Rob
On 8/3/21 8:37 PM, David McGough via 44Net wrote:
I fully agree that a complete
roll-it-for-yourself Linux routing solution
is totally impractical for 99.9% of users and would be a nightmare for
maintainers....I'm the developer and maintainer of HamVoIP (with about
10,000 users), so I know this well!!
My suggestion would be to roll an (almost) plug-and-play distro (or
packages), to make the Linux setup process trivial.
This is doable, if fact, probably even easy to do.
73, David KB4FXC
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