John Ackermann AG9V wrote:
> I've recently started playing with the monax25 package (available from
>
> Jonathans' site) under Linux. It's a package of programs that
> capture,
> and process, the data from a packet channel and allow you to measure
> utilization, number of retries, channel efficiency, and other really
> interesting stuff. In particular, you can look at "circuits" (pairs
> of
> stations) and see how well they are communicating.
>
> The "stats" program that's part of the package generates a neat log of
>
> activity on the channel, but it's designed for interactive use --
> although
> you can enter the necessary parameters at the command line, it shows a
>
> running trace of channel activity, and can accept keyboard input for
> configuration.
>
> I wanted to run it in the background, redirected to /dev/null, but
> that's
> not as simple as it looks. You need to redirect stdin as well as
> stdout
> and errout, or the program will terminate as soon as there's any
> keyboard
> activity on the console from which you started it.
>
> But, if you redirect the input from /dev/null, the program does some
> sort of
> busy wait that sucks up 100 percent of the CPU.
>
> I ended up doing this:
>
> ./stats < /dev/tty7 > /dev/tty7 2>&1 &
>
> to redirect it to an unused virtual terminal. That seems to work
> fine.
>
> Also, as distributed the program would segfault after running for a
> few
> minutes monitoring our 19.2kb repeater off a PI card. My guess is
> that
> the counters were overflowing trying to keep up with the traffic on
> the
> high(er) speed channel -- this program was written in 1987 for 1200
> baud
> monitoring.
>
> It's hardwired to dump its output a the logfile every five minutes; I
> changed
> that to two minutes and the problem seems to have gone away.
>
> I also made a couple of tweaks to support 38.4 serial lines, and
> increase the
> maximum packet size from 256 up to 1600. I also moved the location of
> the
> logfile from ./LOG to /var/ax25/monax25/LOG to (sort of) comply with
> FSSTD.
>
> I've posted my slightly patched version to
>
> ftp://ftp.febo.com/pub/linux_ham/monax251.1a.tar.gz.
>
> Feel free to grab it if you'd like. I do think that this tool could
> be
> made *really* slick if someone with some programming knowledge -- and
> understanding of our protocols -- would put a bit of effort into
> updating
> and enhancing it. Unfortunately, I don't have the skill set to do
> more
> than potch with it.
>
> John AG9V
> aihfvyhx.pfreohk@tilivakka.fi
--73's - Tim Connolly mailto:gllqv@atk.com mailto:yeczqa@plaidonline.com http://www.timsnet.com/