[Skimmertalk] Skimmer Server & CQWW: one year late

[Pete Smith]

Very interesting report, Wes. We're all learning as we go along, but 
things are, indeed, much better.

The RBN logged about 885,000 spots on Sunday, an average of a little 
over 10/second. Saturday sees to have been a little lower, around 
800,000. We successfully served a peak of 147 concurrent users on the 
single RBN Telnet node at telnet.reversebeacon.net 7000. Logs indicate a 
few times that the node went down and re-started automatically. It looks 
like most users were using clients with auto-reconnect capability.

In addition, I'm sure that VE7CC-1 and maybe some other CC Cluster nodes 
were serving spots from RBN-connected Skimmers.

It would be interesting to see how many people were connecting to 
individual Skimmers. As one of the most reliable Skimmers on the RBN, 
I'm not surprised Wes got such a large number of direct connections.

73, Pete N4ZR

The World Contest Station Database, updated daily atwww.conteststations.com
The Reverse Beacon Network athttp://reversebeacon.net, blog at reversebeacon.blogspot.com,
spots at telnet.reversebeacon.net, port 7000


On 11/28/2010 9:37 PM, Wes Cosand wrote:
> What a difference a year makes!
>
> First an apology.  Of all the nights for Verizon to turn off the fiber optic
> line to the house for two hours, Saturday night was the wrong night.  Of
> course they changed the IP address so users who were using a numerical
> address instead of cw.wz7i.com were unable to reconnect.  I apologize.
>
> I think I have found a computer system appropriate for running SkimServer.
>   I used an Intel Core 2 Quad Q8300 and at times it ran over 2200 decoders
> without getting above 80% CPU utilization.  I never saw less than 100%
> decoding.  XP Pro was the OS and the Skimmer Server version was 1.2.0.110.
>
> I was unaware of the CWSegment lines in the SkimSrv.ini file.  But Saturday
> morning I looked at a bandmap and saw a hole between 7.035 and 7.045 and
> realized something was wrong.  I modified the default CWSegment lines and
> broadened the segments to accommodate contesters outside the strict CW
> portions of the bands.  Alex suggests having two or three versions of the
> CWSegment line and then “commenting out” the undesired lines so one can
> rapidly modify the file.  My current version of this area of the file is
> below but I can’t guarantee it is optimal. I am still learning.  I would be
> very interested in suggestions from contesters about appropriate band
> segments.
> ;DX CW Segments
> CwSegments=1800000-1870000,3500000-3570000,7000000-7070000,10100000-10130000,14000000-14070000,18068000-18095000,21000000-21070000,24890000-24920000,28000000-28070000,50000000-50100000
> ;Contest CW Segments
> ;CwSegments=1800000-1870000,3500000-3600000,7000000-7100000,10100000-10130000,14000000-14125000,18068000-18095000,21000000-21120000,24890000-24920000,28000000-28120000,50000000-50100000
>
> Of course, there must not be any “carriage returns” in these lines.  If you
> bring up your SkimSrv.ini file in Notepad and turn off Word Wrap, the
> command should be one long line.  The above contest segments line assumes
> you will run 192 kHz bandwidth.
>
> With the telnet spot filtering set to “Aggressive”, and having the CWSegment
> line set inappropriately for the first 15 hours or so, the system generated
> 63,000 spots from a HyGain HyTower Junior vertical.  This is not as many as
> some of the systems.
>
> I want to express my appreciation to those cluster owners who made these
> spots available to contesters without them having to connect directly to my
> computer.  I don’t have a good feel for how much telnet connections cost in
> cpu time or network traffic – I wouldn’t think it very much.  However I
> averaged 10 connections and it seemed to have an impact, at least on the
> house network.
>
> Hopefully during this contest I corrected a couple of stupid errors and next
> contest I will be better prepared.  Things went much better than last year!
>
>
> I welcome suggestions that would improve the data.  I hope folk had fun
>
> Wes, WZ7I
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