[aprssig] Question

[Jason KG4WSV]

On Sat, Sep 12, 2009 at 12:35 AM, Greg D. <ko6th_greg at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Jason,
>
> A while ago (a couple of years, I think) I got my iGate on the air and
> connected into the Internet.  Through a process of research, advice, and
> some blind luck it ended up being configured to connect to
> socal.aprs2.net:14580, along with a pass-code.  Is that not correct?  It
> seems to work just fine.

As long as socal.aprs.2net is up, and the network connection between
you and it is up, and you and the operator of socal.aprs2.net is happy
with the arrangement, then there's no reason to ever change it.


Using the name rotate.aprs.net (or rotate.aprs2.net) provides fault
tolerance and load distribution.  These DNS names return one of a list
of server IPs, and most DNS implementations will return addresses such
that you'll get a different server IP each time you resolve that name.

This means that, for example, if you're connected to third.aprs.net
and we have a network outage, your Igate (if properly written as
mentioned in an earlier email) will immediately (re)connect to first
or second and resume operation.

For another example, if fourth.aprs.net was added to the core, within
a very short time the load would be distributed across all 4 servers,
and users wouldn't need to do a thing to make this happen.

On reason to use a specific server would be for a special project,
like the server geared toward space-based igates (I need to look that
one up myself, as I recently got another radio and can now set a
145.825 igate up).

-Jason
kg4wsv