APRS-IS server selection for aprx users - IMPORTANT - CHANGES NEEDED!

[Heikki Hannikainen]

Hi,

I'm Hessu, OH7LZB, the author of the aprs.fi service, and also the
operator of the finland.aprs2.net server.

Yesterday Ge0rG notified me on IRC that the finland.aprs2.net server
is not accepting new connections from clients any more. It had reached
it's configured maximum limit of 200 clients. The javaprssrvr software
running on that server is using a lot of CPU capacity, and I would not
like to increase the client limit much (although I now upped it to 300
clients so that everyone can stay connected). If you look at the
server status list at http://aprs2.net/ you will notice that
finland.aprs2.net (T2FINLAND) has over 200 users now, while most of
the servers have well under 100 users.

I noticed that many of the users on the server are running aprx
(http://finland.aprs2.net:14501/). I then noticed that the example
configurations of aprx contain this:

#server igates.aprs.fi
#server finland.aprs2.net
server rotate.aprs.net

I would ask ALL USERS OF APRX to change their aprx.conf configuration
files, by removing the above lines, and adding ONLY the following
line:

server rotate.aprs2.net

This will cause your server to automatically connect to one of the 76
available Tier2 servers. Should that server break or otherwise become
unavailable, your aprx igate will automagically reconnect to one of
the others which are available and operational at that moment. This
will also reduce the load on finland.aprs2.net, which helps me a bit.

If you wish to make sure you're connecting to a server that is closer
to you, it can be a good idea to use one of the regional server pool
addresses listed here, instead of rotate.aprs2.net:

http://www.aprs2.net/wiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RegionalDNS

The setting "server finland.aprs2.net" is the worst option, because if
my T2FINLAND server would stop working, your igate would break also,
until I happen to have time to fix it. T2FINLAND is running on a very
old and quite slow Sun E4500 server - I wouldn't bet on it's
availability.

Thank you for your attention!

- Hessu, OH7LZB