[aprssig] Where is finland.aprs2.net?

[Matti Aarnio]

On Sun, Sep 13, 2009 at 11:22:52AM -0400, Jeremy McDermond wrote:
> On Sep 13, 2009, at 10:35 AM, Pentti Gronlund wrote:
>> finland.aprs.net seems to be an alias of rotate.aprs2.net, with much
>> increasing latency and links going off-on.
>>
>> What is happening over there? Somebody having an ego-trip of his life,
>> or just another case of bad engineering?
>
> My understanding is that the operator of finland.aprs2.net could not be 
> contacted to get him/her to upgrade their version of javAPRSSrvr to  
> something acceptably current, and therefore finland.aprs2.net was  
> removed from the system.

The question about "acceptably current" is an interesting one..
Where I run systems, the rules are:
   - Known externally exploitable security vulnerabilities need to be
     fixed as soon as possible
   - Known bugs affecting stability are also fixed as soon as feasible
   - Known bugs affecting user experience may warrant an update,
     depending on the obscurity of the bug in question
   - Known bugs not affecting user experience, but e.g. producing wrong
     statistics are fixed when convenient, if ever
   - Performance improvements of a few percent are not usually worth
     an update, 50% or more since currently used version may be worth it
   - If system version is announced "support will end in 12 months",
     replacement is put on planning


Service stability is far more important, than running after lattest code
version from vendor.  Commercial software vendors know this.

But then the APRS-IS service is not supposed to be stable ?

Excuses of "but the internet will have connectivity breaks" -type are
not a reason to restart the APRS-IS system whenever one feels like it.
While individual IGate user's ADSL link may fail every week or so (mine
has had uptime of 6 months now), servers are put on far more stable
network service locations.

Also, each APRS-IS server has quite massive and long time state data inside,
which is important if bidirectional messaging support is important.
Now if that messaging thing is not important, then by all means, we can put
APRS-IS servers to update and reboot every hour.

I have done high-available services where CONS service is literally
continuing while software implementing it has been changed.  This did
in one case include even passing existing CONS connections from old
server process to new server process (it is trivially simple thing in
modern UNIX systems) so that connected clients did not see the service
restart, nor did they need to reconnect.


> I would recommend that you use either euro.aprs2.net to get the European 
> rotation, or find another Tier 2 server that may be closer latency-wise 
> to you (maybe netherlands.aprs2.net or belgium.aprs2.net).

Like radio, the internet has its own "Rayleight Fading Universe", and saying
that "Belgium might be close for Finns" is really not any guarantee.  Some
parts of Belgium may be well reachable from some parts of Finland, but for
other propagation paths (ISP:s) the connectivity is different.

A system in Finland is close to Finnish users via FICIX interconnect with
far better probability than a system somewhere else.


> Apologies for any inconvenience, and if you have any questions, please  
> feel free to ask.
>
>> Benjamin OH3BK
> --
> Jeremy McDermond (NH6Z) - SysOp oregon.aprs2.net

73 de Matti, OH2MQK