Saturday, 21 June, 2008, 18:54 PST

The 2m and 70cm ports of the packet node stack at Spout Springs are a bit "under the weather."

Although both ALW:WA7V-7 and ALW96:WA7V-9 are technically operational, the RF performance of both nodes have been seriously degraded since about the middle of May.  Since they share a common duplexer, feedline and antenna, the problem is expected to be found in one of those components.  Interestingly, this doesn't seem to be associated with a severe weather event, of the sort that occurs routinely throughout the winter months.

Furthermore, an abundance of snow (including an additional surprise 14"+ snowfall on June 10) continues to prevent a leisurely drive to the radio site by automobile.  Just before the most recent snowfall, it was reported that N7ERT encountered about 4' of snow at the gate which is roughly 2 miles from the site.  Because of the lateness of the season, I've held off visiting the site until I can drive up there.  Besides, I didn't really want to trudge up there through the snow, even if it was on skis or snowshoes, and then have a tower climb to look forward to.  ;)

My current guess is that I'll be visiting the site in early July to determine the problem.  The repair may not happen until a subsequent trip is made on another date, depending on what is needed to fix it.

73, 

WA7V

Saturday, 10 November, 2007, 15:31 PST

As many of you know, ALWGW BBS links with the rest of the inland pacific northwest region via the ALW node stack near Tollgate, Oregon, atop the Blue Mountains.  This crucial site overlooks a huge chunk of territory, and provides reliable communications over much of northeast Oregon, southeast Washington, and across Hell's Canyon into Idaho.

The ALW stack enjoys its vantage point thanks to the Spout Springs Repeater Association's willingness to share their facility and promote other aspects of amateur radio besides just 2M voice operations.  The 146.800- repeater has fantastic coverage, with some mobile "hot spots" even reaching into locations across the Cascade Range over 200 miles away.  It is routinely used by passing motorists because of its large footprint, and many of the region's residents use it to talk to their neighbors in adjoining valleys or across the mountains.

Now the SSRA needs our help.  While the ALW node stack that I maintain does not incur any significant costs unless I am replacing or upgrading equipment, the repeater association DOES have recurring costs.  These include electricity, a lease fee to the US Forest Service, liability insurance, and a corporate fee.  There also needs to be sufficient funds to handle repairs to the building, tower, antenna, backup batteries, and other equipment.  The severe weather (particularly wind and ice) takes its toll on outdoor items so that they need periodic replacement.

Despite the bargain of SSRA dues, membership is at record lows.  There are not enough paid-up members to even cover recurring costs, let alone handle unforeseen failures.  I'd encourage users of this system to join the SSRA to help keep the system afloat.  It would be a tragedy if the repeater site were no longer available to local radio amateurs.

For more information on the Spout Springs Repeater Association, visit their web site at http://www.ssra.net/.  To join, click on the "Contact Us" link, which is located here.

Please do what you can.  If not membership, perhaps you'll consider making a small donation to help them out.

73 es tnx,

de WA7V 

Thursday, 13 September, 2007, 18:11 PST

Since the "Chat" and "Contact Us" modules have not been working for quite some time, I have removed them from the main menu.  Apparently they are not compatible with the current version of PostNuke.  I will eventually come up with something to replace their functionality, particularly the "contact us" form.

For now, if you need to reach me, you may try to send an email to [contact] at [wa7v] dot [com].   There's no guarantee that your message will make it past the spam filtering, but if it is rejected, you should receive a failure notice from your own mail server.  We do *not* dump messages into a special spam folder; they are either rejected or accepted -- nothing else.

Hope you're having a great autumn (or spring, depending upon which side of the equator you're on) so far!

73,

WA7V

Wednesday, 29 August, 2007, 21:43 PST

Awhile back, Walla Walla College announced that they will be changing their official name to Walla Walla University.  This change will be taking effect on 01 September, 2007, which is just a few days from when I write this.

A side effect of this is the changing of domain names, from wwc.edu to wallawalla.edu.   It is my understanding that support of the wwc.edu domain will be going away.  If you are accustomed to accessing services here based on one of ALW's wwc.edu hostnames, you should be prepared for that access to stop working at some date in the future unless you make the change to wallawalla.edu.  Of course you may also use services based on the wa7v.com domain (e.g. gw.wa7v.com for ALWGW).

73 de WA7V

Friday, 06 April, 2007, 17:32 PST

Once again, WA7V-10 was conspicuously absent from the list of Telpac gateways, even though it was functioning fine and regularly communicating with its primary PMBO.  I thought perhaps the registration had mysteriously disappeared, like it did last time, but such was not the case.  Then I noticed that WA7V-10's primary PMBO, KB6YNO, was listed as offline on the PMBO status page.

Since WA7V-10 was not having any difficulty in establishing a network connection with KB6YNO, it was not falling back on any of its other backup PMBOs in its configuration file.  It would be interesting to know how this would affect the delivery of mail.  I might have to try it to see.

WA7V-10 is now back in the Telpac gateways list, as it is using an alternate PMBO as its primary.

Tuesday, 06 March, 2007, 18:37 PST
I was alerted by N7ZHG that WA7V-10 was not showing up on the Telpac gateway real-time status list and map pages.  It turned out that WA7V-10 wasn't even showing up on the registration page, so I had to re-register.  Once that was done, everything "automagically" appeared.  Hmm!

Saturday, 24 February, 2007, 20:07 PST

A number of governments around the world will be changing the beginning and ending dates for the timezone shift known as daylight savings time.  In the United States, DST will begin on the second Sunday in March at 0200, and end on the first Sunday in November at 0200.  If you reside in an affected country and timekeeping is important on your computer equipment, then you may need to manually intervene, depending upon your system.  Amateur radio operators in particular (who are frequently known for their thriftiness and resourcefulness) may be affected by this more than the general population of computer users, as hams are more likely to have some very old hardware and software still in operation.

Below are a few resources that might interest you if you are running Linux, Solaris, or an older version of Windows.

Read full article: 'Daylight Savings Time Resources'

Saturday, 10 February, 2007, 21:02 PST

Last night, an ALWGW user had another Internet SMTP message arrive that caused a TNOS 2.40 SIGSEGV crash.  The symptoms were the same as those encountered previously (I would recommend reading the background in "Long-term mystery SOLVED," if you haven't already), except that this time there was no X-Face: line present in the header.  The crash did occur in reject.c, but this time it was the To: field causing the problem.  Again, examining the message, no unusual characters were present, although the line was a bit long.

I reviewed and compared the earlier problem messages with the new one, and finally determined what I believe is the key to this issue.  It is not so much the actual content or type of characters that are present in the header lines causing the crashes, but rather the number of characters in any given header line.  It appears to cause a problem when any one line in the headers has more than 256 characters.  When viewed from a 2007 frame of reference, this is a significant weakness!  I will go back and examine the code as I have time, and see if I can come up with a fix.

For now, I have added a line to my Postfix header checks that silently drops any header line exceeding 255 characters:

/^.{256,}/   IGNORE

Many mailers wrap long header lines anyway.  RFC-822 certainly provides for that option.

Note: Interestingly, every time this problem has cropped up on my system, the troublesome message has come through a Yahoo group!

Wednesday, 07 February, 2007, 23:04 PST

A month or so ago, members of the Pendleton (Oregon) Amateur Radio Club were exploring the possibility of registering their own Internet domain, and moving their web hosting to another location.  A quick whois of the desired domain name (based on their US FCC-registered amateur radio callsign) revealed that their name was available in pretty much all TLDs.  On the day prior to the club officers' regularly scheduled meeting, in which they were to publicly consider the merits of this proposal, the .COM form of their domain was suddenly registered to a company in Nassau, Bahamas!  This seemed so incredibly unlikely, and yet, there it was.  The officers were advised of this, and encouraged to use the .ORG form, since they are a not-for-profit organization anyway.  The officers approved of the proposal, and determined that they would need to go before the general membership to get the final approval they needed to proceed.

A few days later, I noticed that the [Nassau company's] .COM registration was no longer showing up in whois queries!  I was completely baffled by this, as the expiration date had been one full year out.  But, there it was and I couldn't explain it.  I shrugged my shoulders and awaited the general membership meeting results to see what we were going to do.  Fast-forward to 06 February, and read on for what was to be a truly educational experience for me.

Note: Sure enough, as of February 10, 2007, whois queries indicate that the .ORG version of their domain is once again available.

Read full article: 'Domain Tasting?'

Tuesday, 06 February, 2007, 01:23 PST

For a few years, I have been having an intermittent problem with certain, infrequent Internet SMTP messages inducing TNOS crashes on ALWGW.  The occurrences have caused more than one headache, but I am glad to say that I now have a solution for it!

Note: The information in this article is still relevant, but the solution is superceded by More TNOS SMTP crashes and a workaround.

Read full article: 'Long-term mystery SOLVED!'