All of a sudden I have received a flurry of responses to my posting in March
1999.
I don't know what has caused this, but re-reading them causes me to remember
a few additional points.
I now recall why a 6 character alias caused problems. It was because I had
used a number as the 6th character. Specifically we had a node
STCDX:K0IR-7 and I added a node STCDX1:K0IR-2. Surrounding TheNet
X1J nodes would not deal correctly (yes I know that's pretty vague - I don't
remember the exact details) with STCDX1. I had to change it to STCDXA
at which point all was well. STCDX1 may be legal, standards wise, but it
appears the alias parser in TheNet or BPQ may be not up to the job.
On the other hand perhaps someone who knows may tell me that no digits
are allowed in an alias. That could be. I have searched what documentation
I have on TheNet and BPQ and there is no mention of excluding digits. I
will guess that the inclusion of a digit may cause it to be interpreted as a
callsign.
I do know that a # is permitted as the first character of an alias, and
depending
upon the setting of an option bit such an alias may or may not be propagated
by nodes broadcasts. Additionally mixed case is permitted in aliases and
depending upon an option is or is not forced to upper case by a listening
node.
Perhaps this subject is dead and buried.
Ron N5IN
----- Original Message -----
From: "Tomi Manninen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Ron Stordahl" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: "Linux Hams" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Wednesday, March 03, 1999 3:16 AM
Subject: Re: Alias in ax25 util help
: On Tue, 2 Mar 1999, Ron Stordahl wrote:
:
: > I checked and X1J4 accepts 6 characters, yet I know it caused me
: > trouble, details escape me now, perhaps it was a surounding BPQ
: > node which truncated it to 5. But as 6 is the spec thats what the
: > software must support!
:
: I've never seen any problems and we generally always use 6 character
: aliases. The nodes around us include at least BPQ, TheNET, TheNET X1J and
: Linux.
:
: > By the way X1J4 permits up to 3 extra aliases, each of which will also
: > respond to ALIAS-SSID. I have no idea if Linux supports this.
:
: Linux will listen to whatever you put in the ax25d.conf file. You can make
: a Linux box respond to hundreds of callsigns or aliases, with different
: SSIDs or any SSID or for example just SSIDs -10...-15 or whatever you
: like, limited by your imagination. The difference is that Linux doesn't do
: anything by default, you have to configure it.
:
: (The difficult part is the interface hardware addresses (ie. the
: callsigns you see with "ifconfig"). Mixing them with callsigns in
: ax25d.conf and with each other is potentially dangerous and you will have
: to know what you are doing. But with the tricks I and John have described
: you can configure your Linux based node system to be simple and intuitive
: for the users.)
:
: --
: --... Tomi Manninen / [EMAIL PROTECTED] / OH2BNS @ OH2RBI.FIN.EU ...--
:
:
