I have been running an IGate in North London for some time, with the call sign MB7UBP using APRS4R running under OpenWRT on an Asus router. All has been fine and the system has needed little attention, until this weekend when the gate stopped reporting to the Internet.
I have logged into APRS4R and everything is running OK, but I couldn’t get the router to ping the WWW. I run a wired LAN to my radio shack (loft!) and the cables were firmly seated at both my ADSL router and the APRS box. This had stumped me for a while, until I realised that I was forced to cheat when wiring the APRS LAN cable. During installation I didn’t have a long enough cable to do the whole lot in a single run, so I made up two shorter cables, connected with a female back to back joiner. This joiner happens to be quite close to the main electrical switch to the shack and it seems that I managed to dislodge one Ethernet cable when I reached across to throw the switch on my way out. Doh! Anyhow, all is now fixed and I am back on the air.
That has taken me three days to work out, so my apologies to users who may have missed some functionality. The only good news is that the system was still active on RF and other local gates such as 2E0RNT and M0XDC probably picked up traffic for me in, albeit with an extra hop inserted.
I have logged into APRS4R and everything is running OK, but I couldn’t get the router to ping the WWW. I run a wired LAN to my radio shack (loft!) and the cables were firmly seated at both my ADSL router and the APRS box. This had stumped me for a while, until I realised that I was forced to cheat when wiring the APRS LAN cable. During installation I didn’t have a long enough cable to do the whole lot in a single run, so I made up two shorter cables, connected with a female back to back joiner. This joiner happens to be quite close to the main electrical switch to the shack and it seems that I managed to dislodge one Ethernet cable when I reached across to throw the switch on my way out. Doh! Anyhow, all is now fixed and I am back on the air.
That has taken me three days to work out, so my apologies to users who may have missed some functionality. The only good news is that the system was still active on RF and other local gates such as 2E0RNT and M0XDC probably picked up traffic for me in, albeit with an extra hop inserted.