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public:radio:2025:allstar_expands

2025 Radio Topics

Allstar Expands

Digging Deeper into Allstar

I've seen a few examples of small networks and am interested in building up a larger system.

Some examples that interested me:

Adding more nodes

It's possible to have up to 10 individual Node IDs with a single Allstar node number, by using NNX to add a 6th digit to the base node number…

My Base Number is 48148 and I activated the NNX feature and created 3 nodes

  • 481480
  • 481481
  • 481482

Since they are all behind a NAT firewall, sharing one public IP address the nodes must use different UDP ports. To make this possible I created 2 new Server instances on the Allstar Portal, one per node, and chose the UDP ports :

https://www.allstarlink.org/portal/servers.php

  • node481480UDP 4569
  • node481481UDP 4570
  • node481482UDP 4571

The choice of which server is used per node is chosen on the Node configuration page for each node, on the Allstar Portal

https://www.allstarlink.org/portal/nodes.php

Then I flashed new SD cards for the new nodes using the ASL 2.0.0 Beta 6 image I've used for the initial VHF Gateway node.

https://github.com/AllStarLink/ASL-Live-Build/releases/download/2.0.0-beta.6/asl-2.0.0-beta.6-kc1kcc-20210324-raspberrypi-armhf.img.zip

The config. for the original node had to be changed, to reflect the new node number 481480 versus 48148 which means editing (at least)

  • /etc/asterisk/rpt.conf
  • /etc/asterisk/iax.conf
  • /etc/asterisk.extensions.conf

To ensure each internal LAN node can find each other (can't rely on Allstar's DNS) it's necessary to add each one to the [nodes] stanza in each node's config file /etc/asterisk/rpt.conf using the appropriate IP and UDP port depending on which node is being configured.

; from the VHF Gateway node 481480
[nodes]
481480 = radio@127.0.0.1:4569/481480,NONE      

481481 = radio@192.168.21.250:4570/481481,NONE  

481482 = radio@192.168.21.251:4571/481482,NONE

I added the DVSwitch bridging to the hub node 481481 which is configured as radioless, I made a local/private node on that machine 1399 for this purpose.

All 3 nodes have supermon and this needed some configuration to make sure the Asterisk Manager ports were available on their external interfaces bindaddr = 0.0.0.0 and not just on the loopback bindaddr = 127.0.0.1

/etc/asterisk/manager.conf

;
; Asterisk Call Management support
;

; By default asterisk will listen on localhost only.
[general]
enabled = yes
port = 5038
bindaddr = 0.0.0.0

[admin]
secret = YOUR_MANAGER_PASSWORD
read = all,system,call,log,verbose,command,agent,user,config
write = all,system,call,log,verbose,command,agent,user,config

Port Forwarding

My ADSL router has the following port forwards to allow external incoming connections to be set up

  • UDP 4569192.168.21.109 for the VHF Gateway / Echolink node
  • UDP 4570192.168.21.250 for the DMR Bridge node
  • UDP 4571192.168.21.251 for the Test Node
  • UDP 5198-5199192.168.21.109 for Echolink client connections
  • TCP 42110192.168.21.109 for the VHF Gateway/Echolink node's Dashboard
  • TCP 42111192.168.21.250 for the DMR Bridge node's Dashboard
  • TCP 42112192.168.21.252 for the Test node's Dashboard

To allow the node numbers to be resolved to useful names tp display on the dashboards the script astdb.php should run nightly to maintain a lookup table.

The image came with several copies of astdb.php in different places, all updating a central data file /var/log/asterisk/astdb.txt. Which was confusing, as they all looked in different places for the file detailing private nodes.

To allow private node numbers to appear as useful information, rather than not in database you first put the information in a file privatenodes.txt

1399|GM4SLV|Bridge to DMR|TGIF TG2354429

and then the astdb.php script pulls it in, with all the other nodes downloaded from the web, but astdb.php must know where to find the privatenodes.txt file.

The easiest way is to run the astdb.php from the directory containing privatenodes.txt

and therefore it's the copy in /var/www/html/supermon/ that is used, since privatenodes.txt resides here too.

To automate the process the update is done nightly via /etc/cron.daily/allstar_helpers which was modified to point to the correct version of astdb.php

#!/bin/bash
 
# Get new allmon data daily
/var/www/html/supermon/astdb.php

The nodes monitored, and the menu to select them, and external websites, on each node's Supermon Dashboard is configured by allmon.ini

Here's the current version:

Generic /var/www/html/supermon/allmon.ini

VHF Gateway

Platform Raspberry Pi 2 Model B Rev 1.1
InterfaceCM108 Soundcard - modified
RadioFT-1500M @ 5W
Frequency144.9125MHz
Allstar Node 481480
Dashboard http://gm4slv.plus.com:42110/

The initial node, described here : GM4SLV Allstar 2025 got too cumbersome adding DMR Bridging, along with handling Echolink.

I decided, since I had a few spare Raspberry Pi boards doing nothing much, to split the DMR Bridging to a separate node.

I removed the DVSwitch bridging from the VHF Gateway node.

/etc/asterisk/rpt.conf

/etc/asterisk/iax.conf

/etc/asterisk/extensions.conf

/etc/asterisk/modules.conf (load echolink)

DMR Bridging Node

Platform Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Rev 1.2
Allstar Node 481481
Dashboard http://gm4slv.plus.com:42111/

This one is for linking the others together, and running DVSwitch to bridge to (at the moment) TGIF TG2354429 (my ID Talkgroup)

I added the DVSwitch software, in the same way described here GM4SLV Allstar 2025 and decided to bridge to TGIF instead of Brandmeister.

/etc/asterisk/rpt.conf

I also decided to use the md380_emu emulator for the AMBE transcoding.

/opt/MMDVM_Bridge/MMDVM_Bridge.ini

/opt/Analog_Bridge/Analog_Bridge.ini

/etc/asterisk/extensions.conf

/etc/asterisk/iax.conf

/etc/asterisk/echolink.conf

FIXME

Test Node

Platform Raspberry Pi 2 Model B Rev 1.1
Allstar Node 481482
Dashboard http://gm4slv.plus.com:42112/

This one is to use for tests and experiments….

FIXME

John Pumford-Green 05/06/25 22:30 BST

Further Information

public/radio/2025/allstar_expands.txt · Last modified: by john