[aprssig] Why Not "Gate in Vicinity"

[Pete Loveall AE5PL Lists]

That's great unless you drop packets to RF that should be gated because someone has their cellphone app misconfigured.  There was a Chinese cellphone beaconing every second (or faster) last night.  Instead of focusing on how to make IGates throttle output, make them do what they were originally specified to do: gate all packets heard to APRS-IS, gate to RF messages addressed to "local" stations heard on RF and associated posits.  Everything else is sysop option and sysops should not configure their IGates such that they can't perform their primary function.

And cellphone app authors need to understand that the APRS-IS is -not- their own private Internet network and is primarily there to interconnect amateur radio RF APRS networks.  Based on that primary mission, it must be assumed that any packet heard on APRS-IS will probably be gated to RF somewhere in the world so software should not be able to be configured to stream packets to APRS-IS.  Authors, take responsibility for your software and limit configurations and distribution of passcodes.

Off soapbox.

73,

Pete Loveall AE5PL
pete at ae5pl dot net

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Heikki Hannikainen
> Sent: Friday, December 23, 2011 12:57 AM
> 
> By the way, aprx (the software which used to have the APRSIS srccall for
> telemetry bug) has a very nice rate limiting feature for digipeating to RF. It
> should be able to provide some protection against heavy misconfigurations
> like this in any software (either aprx itself or something on the other side of
> the IS).
> 
>         ratelimit      60 120      # default: average 60 packets/minute,
>                                    #          burst max 120 packets/minute
> 
> The values are for example only, 60 packets / minute is quite a lot already. It'll
> drop packets going out on the RF port exceeding this setting, so that the
> channel won't be completely flooded.