I've had a 2m APRS I-Gate for several years now, running on an old Raspberry Pi with a piggy backed TNC-Pi. It just plodded on, with the same SD card for year after year. Yesterday I noticed it wasn't working. I couldn't SSH to it, or ping it. Rebooting it was to no avail. I guess the SD card had finally given up the ghost.

I thought I'd got a image file stored somewhere, so it would be a simple matter of flashing a new image to an SD card and away we go. I looked everywhere and all I could find was an image called igate.img on my NAS box. Was this the one?

I flashed it to a working card and booted it, but no, it wasn't the same as the old APRS install. It was an image for a small portable igate I'd built a few years ago, not using the TNC-Pi, but using direwolf as the TNC. So I had to get on and set this one up to use the TNC-Pi connected to the gpio.

It's been a few years since I first set it up, but fortunately I had a documented account of the main aspects here VHF APRS iGate which gave me enough information to get it working - and I found on the web an old document showing the steps needed to allow the TNC to be accessible via the serial port https://www.manualslib.com/manual/1266633/Coastal-Tnc-Pi.html and here's the manual in pdf form tncpi.pdf

Eventually everything worked. I'd used dixprs as the i-gate software (and occasionally aprx) but I remember the steps to install dixprs were quite convoluted - and in the intervening years the site where the necessary information was held has now gone. https://sites.google.com/site/dixprs/ so I decided I'd just let it go, and switch to aprx permanently.

(I found that the Wayback Machine has some snapshots of the dixprs google site for instance : https://web.archive.org/web/20201009100911/https://sites.google.com/site/dixprs/installa but it looks too much hassle now, since aprx is working well.)

The igate is working, and this time I'll remember to take, and store, an image of the SD card so it's easier to replace it in future.