ABUG Scotland #4 - Thu 29th February 2024

[Tosk]

Good to see a range of activities and projects in action!

Ken wrestling with Econet comms. Numerous Raspberry PI boards were scattered across the desk (more back at his home) = why the world suffered a semiconductor shortage. Notice also an Acorn A4 laptop.



Walkerworks demonstrated music from an upgraded Electron (with 4 channels) over bluetooth. You can see the round speaker unit just next to the Electron. Imagine 8 bit music in every room of your home.



This pic is of Ramtop's Electron with his new Electron PLUS 1 project - now happily working and will WOW Electron users across the globe with this new kit that he will bring to market soon.



I showed my Lord of Midnight BASIC Landscaping project on a Beeb. This included a Powerpoint kiosk slideshow running next to it showing how the project development progressed. I'm still figuring out why the colour set change in Mode 1/magic print statements do not work on a real BBC B compared to the Owlet editor.



IanJeffray head to head with a RiscPC. Hope the tea and cake made up for it



Chris brought along an ultra portable Cambridge Z88 and also showed a DEC networking live map from his laptop.

[brianmartin_2001]

Enjoyed it thoroughly last night .. Great talking to you all again .

Many thanks to Ken for Treecopying over my files from the SCSI HDD to the Pi 1Mhz, all via Econet.
I want a Pi Econet Bridge now.

Brian

[Ramtop]

Many thanks to Tosk for an other very enjoyable meeting, it was great to see everyone again.

[walkerworks]

Great evening. Good to catch up and to see a few new projects.

And a couple of firsts for me..seeing a BBC A and a Z88.

Derek

[KenLowe]

Yeah, I missed out on seeing what everyone else had brought. Next time .

[KenLowe]

I also had a rather frustrating evening - trying to get reliable Econet comms between any of my client machines (beeb, atom, A4, Piconet) and any of my bridges. I'm really not sure what was going wrong, but suspect it may have been due to the fact that none of the bridges were connected to an Ethernet network. Once I powered up my router and one of my bridges picked up a WiFi connection / IP address, everything seemed to be more reliable. I'm going to investigate this a bit further once I get back home.

So, I've been able to replicate the issue at home. It turns out this wasn't a hardware or termination issue, but instead was a configuration issue. In my config, I have a trunk that points to a device on the internet. Because this bridge wasn't attached to the internet at the ABUG event, the bridge was being halted when it failed to resolve the IP for the remote device:

In fact it [the bridge] is dying when started as a service as well, but then the systemd restarts it. So your comms will be ultra-flaky. This is the trunk despatch thread complaining that when it starts up it cannot resolve the name of the other end of the trunk - without which it cannot work. So it kills the bridge. If you comment out the trunk config line for that trunk it should work happily...

Killing the entire bridge when it can't resolve a trunk name seems very aggressive. I've asked @cr12925 if that behaviour can be better handled, so the bridge can remain running even when a specific trunk fails to start, or if it drops out for some reason.

Anyway, for the next ABUG meet I know what I need to do to get the bridge running reliably, so I'll hopefully have more time to demonstrate its features a bit better.

[cr12925]

Another workaround is to put an entry for the remote host in /etc/hosts even if it's entirely fictitious. The bridge uses UDP to talk to remote trunks, so its traffic will just disappear into the metaphorical internet bin, and the bridge will regard the trunk as existent...

Or just put a random IP address for the trunk in question in the config!

I'll ponder whether I can bring myself to just make it not create a trunk if the remote host doesn't exist. It breaks one of the design principles of the code, however...

C.

[Tosk]

Hi folks,

Since the Easter holidays are around the date I'd like to propose for our next meeting, I'd like to check in with you to see which of you can make either of these dates - which is better for you?. I'm aware that some of you may be going away or have family commitments over or near Easter.

1. Thursday the 28th of March
2. Thursday the 4th of April

[gordonDrogon]

Hi folks,

Since the Easter holidays are around the date I'd like to propose for our next meeting, I'd like to check in with you to see which of you can make either of these dates - which is better for you?. I'm aware that some of you may be going away or have family commitments over or near Easter.

1. Thursday the 29th of March
2. Thursday the 4th of April

I can make either, but the 29th Thu. 28th is the better one for me...

-Gordon

[IanJeffray]

1. Thursday the 29th of March
2. Thursday the 4th of April

Can't do 29th. Can -maybe- do 4th, but can't be sure.
Can I vote for April 11 instead ?

[walkerworks]

1. Thursday the 29th of March
2. Thursday the 4th of April

The 4th suits me better.

I think Thursday is the 28th if that makes a difference to anyone...

Derek

[IanJeffray]

I think Thursday is the 28th if that makes a difference to anyone...

LOL. So it is. I can do that, then.

[Ramtop]

29th 28th is probably better for me, although I should be able to make either.

[KenLowe]

I can do either. No preference.

[DaveLecky]

Either day suits me…….

Dave

[Tosk]

Ok - am going for Thu 28th March - booking thread about to be posted!