the SOTA cluster - see SOTA spots as well as DX

Ignore me - changes it to the newer address and that seems to have worked

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I almost always spot any SOTA operators I manage to hear but I’m having trouble doing it on this website.
What am I doing wrong?

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Most likely because the association is W4C and not WC4

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Good grief. Thanks buddy.

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There was another short outage on the cluster and spotter for about 10mins around 950Z - 1000Z as the server needed security updates and a reboot. Everything looks OK but let me know if you see problems.

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Just checking if the SMS spotter is working ok today? Thanks Ian AZB

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Tried a test SMS today at 00:04z and 11:06z - didn’t work

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By way of an update, tried the SMS yesterday and it worked :slight_smile:

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Sorry for the complete outage of the SOTA cluster and the SMS spotter for about 9 hours yesterday.

Since I fixed a schoolboy programming error ( :blush: ) in my code some time back, the systems have become so reliable that I don’t monitor them any more. Yes, I know that is tempting fate.

Around 1800 yesterday I saw a error message email saying there had been 10 failures of the spotter to respond in a timely manner to an incoming SMS. I see occasional single fails but never 10 fails. I had a look at the server and there was no spotter or cluster app running. Further checks showed the server rebooted 9 hours previously. A quick ticket to the hosting company and they replied saying that they were doing maintenance including live migration to new hardware and some servers failed the migration, mine included. It was down for about 2mins. They also said they were more embarrassed that the automatic “we had to reboot your server” messages failed as well. So they had a double whammy. This is the first time anything like this has happened in 10+ years. They had a big hardware fail at one site which resulted in a server being unavailable for 72hrs and I got a month’s free hosting. I can’t complain TBH. considering how cheap and in general how reliable it is.

The irony of this is the single fail emails I see is when there are too many demands on spinning rust disks and everything was being moved to SSD to speed things up. So the task of making things better long term made them worse for a while!

As I said, it all just keeps working so I don’t check it, slack I know. Nobody contacted to let me know things were amiss which is why it took so long to come back on line. I can see everything is ticking over again now.

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Works well for me most of the time via CQRlog and my Raspberry Pi.

Very occasionally it will drop out.

Must check my settings.

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Works great for me using Log4OM. It will chnage frequnecy using CAT and put the summit in the log. Just click on the spot.

Kent K9EZ

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Again, sorry for the unannounced Cluster and Spotter outage today. I’d been meaning to do a number of updates and the opportunity arose this afternoon. Security updates get applied regularly but the actual Linux distribution was getting rather old. I’d never done an in-situ Linux distribution update before on the VM server so I tested it on another VM and it went painlessly. So the server has been moved from Debian 9 to Debian 11 along with numerous other updates. I wasn’t sure if you can update from 9 to 11 in one step. So I did a 9 to 10 update and then 10 to 11.

A few minor issues reinstalling some missing Python packages but it all seems to be running. Let me know if you see anything wrong.

Note that the Cluster has had a few updates as well. A user was having issues with his connection dropping when there was not much traffic and he had the keepalive set to the minimum value on his software. To help with this I have added 2 new commands which will force the cluster to send its prompt to you and short-ish intervals. Only use these commands if you cannot use a normal keepalive value around 15mins.

The command PING1 will cause the Cluster to send you its prompt once every minute. PING5 is the same but every 5 minutes. If you want to turn this off, log out and log back in again. Only use if you really need it.

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Another very short outage today as security updates required a reboot. I think SMS/Iridium spotting and the cluster were offline for a total of 4mins.

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Just stumbled upon this thread. Thanks for the tips. Is there any chance one of the brilliant people on this thread can share how to add the cluster to RUMlogNG?

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I don’t use that program but all you should need is to set the address and port ( cluster.sota.org.uk and 7300) and your callsign. There’s no password etc. needed.

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Just enter RUMlogNG preferences, go to DX Cluster tab and add it there with the + button. Here’s how it looks for me (use your own call as User Name)

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Thank you for the clear explanation. One more question, do you know how to keep both the default Kiel cluster along side the SOTA cluster? I imagine adding back Kiel manually would provide a dropdown option to toggle between the two.

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do you know how to keep both the default Kiel cluster along side the SOTA cluster?

Sure, just add it alongside SOTA cluster. The address is db0sue.de and port 8000. You might leave User Name and Password blank:
Zrzut ekranu 2023-11-22 o 15.23.39

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