I’ve recently built a new AllStarLink (ASL) node for my MB7IBW gateway that I have recently brought up on air on the 2m band.
AllStarLink 3 has a lot of changes in it when compared to the previous version and this of course impacts my Node-Red Control Dashboard that I’ve been using to manage my first ASL node for well over a year now.
To build the node I used the RaspberryPi imager and added the AllStarlink 3 image as detailed on the allstarlink.org website.
Installing the system this way makes it pretty easy compared to previous installs but, it comes with some quirks which cause issues with Node-Red.
From the outset the plan has always been to have AllStartLink 3 and Node-Red running on the same Pi4 to keep it totally self contained. This was easy enough to achieve and works without issue.
Installing Node-Red onto a Pi4 is really easy and is fully documented on the Node-Red Website.
Once the AllStarLink 3 operating system was installed on my SD card, booted and operational I installed Node-Red. I soon realised that there were a few things I had to do before loading the Node-Red flow.
AllStarLink 3 no longer logs connect and disconnect messages in the connectlog like it did in AllStarLink 2. To get logging working again I had to create two new BASH scripts as detailed below and put them into /etc/asterisk/myscripts.
For the connect information I created the BASH script as detailed below.
#!/bin/bash
# /etc/asterisk/myscripts/connectlog.sh
echo $1 Connected $2 on $(date +"%T") - $(date +"%m-%d-%Y") >> /var/log/asterisk/connectlogFor the disconnect information I created the 2nd script detailed below.
#!/bin/bash
# /etc/asterisk/myscripts/disconnectlog.sh
echo $1 Disconnected $2 on $(date +"%T") - $(date +"%m-%d-%Y") >> /var/log/asterisk/connectlog
Once these scripts were created I had to change the ownership and privileges as detailed below.
cd /etc/asterisk/myscripts
chown asterisk:asterisk ./*
chmod 750 ./*I also had to change ownership/privileges of /etc/asterisk/myscripts.
cd /etc/asterisk
chown asterisk:asterisk ./myscripts
chmod 755 ./myscriptsOnce the two scripts were in place I had to alter the asterisk config so that it called the scripts as part of the connect/disconnect process.
I found the connpgm and discpgm entries in /etc/asterisk/rpt.conf and changed them as shown below.
connpgm = /etc/asterisk/myscripts/connectlog.sh
discpgm = /etc/asterisk/myscripts/disconnectlog.shNext I disabled the temporary filesystems that are used by default for the apache and asterisk logging as it’s useful to keep the apache logs for debugging and I needed the asterisk logs for the Node-Red dashboard.
Disabling the temporary file system is very easy to do, just edit the /etc/fstab and comment out the two lines as shown below.
# Comment out the next line for persistent Apache logs
#tmpfs /var/log/apache2 tmpfs defaults,noatime,nosuid,nodev,noexec,mode=0775,size=32M 0 0
# Comment out the next line for persistent Asterisk logs
#tmpfs /var/log/asterisk tmpfs defaults,noatime,nosuid,nodev,noexec,mode=0775,size=32M,uid=102,gid=106 0 0
# Note: These lines are wrapped, should be on 1 line in the /etc/fstabOnce the entries in the /etc/fstab were commented out I rebooted the Pi4 to get persistent filesystems.
The final thing that had to be done was to allow user repeater to use sudo without a password so that it could be used to perform reboot/shutdown/process restart as user root from within the dashboard.
# /etc/sudoers
# Allow repeater sudo without password
repeater ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALLOnce this was all done I imported the Node-Red flow, configured the SSH nodes with login credentials for the Pi4 (important to use the user repeater for SSH), clicked deploy and the dashboard was ready for use.
I’ve been using the dashboard for a few weeks now and it’s running perfectly, without error.
If you want to build your own Node-Red Control Dashboard for your AllStarLink 3 node then, just download the flow using the button below and import it into your flow editor.
More soon …